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http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Jasaydog.html

Even more basic than ROE...
Where the hell are they going to get all this money from for all these programs?

It is printed out of thin air [1] That is why the USD has a beautiful long term slide [2]
Why does this happen? (A) Because It is a tax you cannot see or calculate into your yearly salary - purchasing power is lost without your noticing - so you do not complain. and (B) The money flows right off the printing press into the pockets of whatever industry the Government happens to favor at the time, which is usually the Military Industrial Complex but sometimes large scale social programs. The first one get the money hot off the printing press get the most value out of it.

If your really interested see the links in [3] for some more...

[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MoneySupply.html

[2] Decline in the U.S. dollar's purchasing power (1800-2005) Source: Barron's
http://seekingalpha.com/wp-content/seekingalpha/images/cash.gif

[3] Economist Rober Higss (of the ratchet effect theory):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Higgs
Banking Act of 1935 + Fedâ(TM)s Exercise of This Authority = New Deal Policy
http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=633
http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=201

Government spending does not stimulate the economy. It takes money FROM the economy and redistributes it to politically favored and connected groups. Bastiat recognized this 160 years ago. Keynesian economic stimulation has never worked before, during, or since Keynes lived. http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

the dimmer / less educated members of society (those currently saying things like "Why are we paying billions to bankers when small businesses don't get bailed out?)

My education taught me about the ad hominem attack in grade school, and hopefully exempted me from this one somewhere between the Bachelor's and the Ph.D. Or does the Ph.D. need to be in economics to count? I can find a few of them who agree with me too.

So rather than slandering the question, would you care to propose your idea of the "brighter / more educated" answer? Make sure it covers the followup question, "Instead of rewarding failed decision makers, why don't we let them go bankrupt so that their more responsible competitors can take over?"

By the way, I found an example: Many Questions About Vytorin. An example of a new, less effective, more dangerous drug which was pushed as being more effective. Hope this helps. You might also read Patent Laws and the War on Good Drugs or Profits-Before-People Delays Release New AIDS Drug.

Patri Friedman, grandson of [Nobel Laureate] Milton and son of anarcho-theorist David, is even today actively planning to launch artificial sea platform communities, which he's calling seasteads, currently hoping to start one in San Francisco Bay. That's the spirit of America, as John Adams never quite said: may I advocate classical-liberal limited government, so that my son may advocate anarcho-capitalism, and that my grandson may plan to build new artificial countries in the ocean.

Excelent, Socialism by Ludwig von Mises is now #2 on a google search for "socialism." It's the book that converted previous liberal democrats like Hayak to free markets. I bet you would have even less faith in government if you read through that.

> Increased CO2 encourages the growth of marine algae and it's entire food chain.
> the rest sinks to the bottom of the ocean and is sequestered...all by itself!

Actually no, it doesn't. Nitrogen supply is the limiting factor for marine culture growth. CO2 is not very important by comparison. Most algae growth, and, of course, the rest of the food chain, occurs in places where deep ocean water is forced to the surface, or where the outflow from rivers brings in nitrogen from land. You could take advantage of this to fight global warming by building lots of OTECs. Read more about this plan in The Millenial Progect by Marshall Savage.

> I freely admit that I have not run the numbers.

Well, when you do, you'll find out that the problems you imagine are not as serious as you think :)

> I can run some numbers for other disasters if you like but my point still stands.

Why don't you try that and when you come up with a realistic catastrophe, I'll be happy to show you why you're wrong ;) Really, a planetoid is so much safer and stable than a planet, it's not even a contest.

> People form large governments BECAUSE they provide services small ones can't

Uh, no. First of all, people don't form governments. Ambitious power-hungry bastards form governments :) Maybe there are a few exceptions, but all governments end up being run by ambitions power-hungry bastards, regardless of who formed them. Second, government services are not something anybody needs. As I said elsewhere, only the lazy need government handouts. The rest of us can make it on our own thank you very much! Third:

> Your scenario is all well and good until two planetoids decide they want to kill off a third and take the resources.

This happens just as easily on Earth, so at worst, you are no worse off. However, conquest is again only possible by government. If there was no government, there'd be no wars, only local aggression. In a free market economy you don't need to conquer anyone; you can just buy what you need.

> But some where along the line their ancestors got extra power and then shut down the competition.

Yes, I admit I do not have a foolproof solution on how to prevent formation of government. When I find one, I'll let you know :) For now I'm just making the assumption that one ought to look for such a solution due to the problems any form of government inevitably brings to society. I will, however assert strongly that capitalism has nothing to do with this. It is an economic system, not a political one. While it does not prevent escalating violence, it certainly goes a long way toward making it unnecessary by defining a non-violent way for people to deal with each other through contracts and monetary exchange.

> Central planning CAN work, it just only works for simply and not particularly industrial economies.

You really need to read the book. It goes into great detail, explaining exactly why socialism in any form can not work. I really don't want to retype the whole thing.

> The AMA and FDA: How to put this...you are a fool.

Good! We're down to name calling. That means you are really paying attention now :)

> This may sound elitist but not everyone can be a doctor. It takes high intelligence (about
> top 1/3 of the population) and a special mentality. It takes 8-12 YEARS of training, the
> first 4 costing $150K and the last 4-8 you get paid as much as a waiter.

Not to insult your high intelligence, but this is bullshit. Yes, you might need a eight years of training to be a neurosurgeon. You don't need any training to sit in the office and diagnose strep throat, indigestion, the flu, acid re

Only 12% of Americans are below the poverty line.

From your own sources:

There is however some controversy regarding the federal poverty line, arguing that it either understates or overstates the problem of poverty. According to the United Nations, which defines poverty among high-income OECD countries as those earning less than 50% of the median, 17% of Americans lived in poverty between 1999 and 2002, the second highest percentage of any high-income OECD country.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

Many researchers believe that the official method of measuring poverty is flawed.

-- http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PovertyintheUnitedStates.html

It's easy to dupe yourself into believing that you're right when you only read one sentence from the source material. Particularly when that sentence is restating an irrelevant and discredited demographic.

It's particularly funny that you linked to "http://scitech.dot.gov/partners/accage/index.html", a page that is making exactly the same case that I am -- the case that the disabled and elderly depend heavily on public transit, and depend on public transit even more so in the relatively near future.

Are you freaking kidding me? That's $10k/year...

1. $100/mo buys a LOT of electricity and heat for someone living in a small apartment or basement suite. So we're not talking about someone living in a cold, unlit cave.
2. People making minimum wage rarely buy healthcare, especially if they're healthy, as is being assumed here. If they become seriously ill, they're just fucked. It's sad, but true.
3. Furniture, TVs, etc, can all be acquired at no cost for anyone who actually knows other people. Hell, people will practically PAY you take furniture and old TVs off their hands, and there are plenty of businesses that will charge you money to do exactly that. So our hypothetical apartment is reasonably well furnished and has basic entertainment facilities.

Adjusting your calculation for the healthcare realities of the US, our hypothetical subject has got a hearty $177 worth of gas money / disposable income for the month. There's no doubt a very interesting discussion lying dormant in the fact that the price of healthcare made such a big difference here; but the fact is, the poor aren't particularly likely to have access to healthcare of any kind, unless they're fortunate enough to live in ... well, pretty much any western nation other than the US. And you know that perfectly well. Including it in your calculation was disingenuous at best.

Now, for extra hilarity:

48% of the poor own a vehicle

Your retarded standard for poverty -- the "poverty line" -- states that poverty for that single person we were talking about begins at an income $10,210. You ramble on about how impossible it is for someone earning $10000 to afford a car. And then you use this statistic that 48% of them have cars... you see the inconsistency here? All you've done is independently demonstrate how goddam stupid the American "Poverty Line" demographic is.

Children alone on a bus are a rarity, at least around here.

Ah, the anecdotal evidence again. How scientific. My own anecdotal evidence contradicts yours, except with regards to the hoard of children on a field trip that you mentioned; I see that kind of thing all the time. Not to mention children on the bus with their families. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find any statistics on exactly what percentage of parents buy the kind of ridiculous paranoia you mentioned. It's prudent to keep a 6 year old from riding the bus on his own; but a 14 year old? That's just insane. Cut the fuck

I suppose clarification would be helpful in this case. If we're talking about who uses transit the most, there are two distinct ways of looking at it: which group makes up the majority of the people using public transit, versus which group has the largest proportion of its members using public transit. Strictly speaking, yes, the able-bodied poor outnumber all other groups on transit. That's because they outnumber all other groups period. Nevertheless, the able-bodied poor are, for the most part, VASTLY better off financially than the elderly et al, and a much greater percentage of them own and drive cars than the elderly, the disabled, and children.

Oh really?
Only 12% of Americans are below the poverty line.
10.2% of the elderly are below the poverty line.
48% of the poor own a vehicle
8% of families on welfare own a vehicle
78% of the elderly own a vehicle

So no, you're just plain wrong.

The healthy adult who works for minimum wage, 30 hours a week, could manage to afford a car, although it would be extremely difficult.

Are you freaking kidding me? That's $10k/year. After taxes, perhaps $8k/year. Let's say that they get all of those taxes back in government benefits and then some -- say, $11k/year. Let's say no kids, which would slaughter their income. Even if you assume they're living in a hellhole that costs only $300/mo, and that they can miraculously keep their combined utilities down to $100/mo (lights off most of the time, low thermostat in the winter, high in the summer, showers every other day, etc -- making the hellhole even more of a hellhole). That's $6,200. Let's say they can keep food costs down to a mere dollar per meal, so $90/mo, meaning there's $5,120 left. Let's say that their healthcare (which almost no minimum wage jobs provide) costs a mere $200/mo *after* copays (try to find a policy that provides a relevant amount of coverage that cheap just *ignoring* copays). That's $2,720/year left. Let's say that they have no TV, no entertainment, no phone, no furniture, no nothing -- they just lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling all evening until they fall asleep. There's $226/mo left. Let's say to keep clothing on their backs and shoes on their feet, they can get by on $6/mo, so $220. Let's say they can somehow pick up a car at a price of only $60/mo -- some old junker that they somehow got a payment plan on -- so $160 left. Well, even if the car is cheap, you need liability coverage at a bare minimum in all 50 states, typically a few tens of thousands of dollars worth in each category. Let's assume that the driver is female, has had a license for several years and no accidents, and is in their thirties. Let's give them fair credit to boot. Perhaps $80/mo, so $80 left. Let's say that they can manage to keep such a junker held together and running for only $20/mo. Hey -- if you make a whole bunch of ridiculously harsh assumptions, they can afford, what, 15 miles per day in gas?

Let's get real. There are no tricks to being poor. A lot of people assume that there must be some sort of trick to get by, but there isn't. You have no choice but to sacrifice a significant amount some combination of mobility, health, and comfort -- cramming lots of people into tiny apartments in bad neighborhoods, going without even basic things like phone service, using the "pray nothing goes wrong" health plan, and so on.

Preteens DO take public transit, even assuming that you discount school buses.

Not proportionally often in the US. Now, Japan, that's a different story. I once shared a bus with an entire class full of school kids on Sado

Wrong. There is such a thing as "human capital", and you misunderstand it.

Help yourself to a description of the term from the economics and sociology professor who coined it.

Because geeks -- computer geeks, anyway -- tend to be of an engineering mindset, rather than an analyst mindset. Hence, you have the distinction between the beliefs in engineering and spontaneous order: a distinction between the beliefs in pre-planning and proaction to a successful outcome, and a successful outcome arising purely reactively through the interactions between multiple agents. Engineering versus emergent behavior.

Free-market economics professor Russell Roberts wrote a good piece on the difference.

Anyway, that's one answer. Another answer is simpler: Slashdot's largest demographic segment is 18-24 year-old males, i.e. college-age geeks. It's pretty much a given that if somebody is in college, their beliefs turn leftist for a while; the arrogant notion that they know it all means they favor ideologies which proclaim success through knowing all a priori, as Soviet socialism did.

The poverty of that view has long since been demonstrated. In spite of the massive computing might possessed by the likes of IBM, Google, the NSA, and so forth, mankind is still quite a ways away from having amassed nearly enough knowledge and understanding of that knowledge and ability to process it all such that the sort of engineering-driven, planned society and economy can possibly succeed.

Oh, I should include as a classic example the various hedge funds out there. They hire brilliant quantitative analysts to work on risk models that require grid computing clusters to calculate. The result? The current, massive sub-prime mortgage meltdown we are seeing.

See also the book titled When Genius Failed, about the failure of Long-Term Capital Management -- a hedge fund that failed 10 years ago for much the same reason those today are failing: lack of sufficient knowledge and predictive capability, i.e., a lack of engineering skill. Nevermind the existence of 2 economics Nobel Laureates on their team, including one (Myron Scholes) partially-responsible for the Black-Scholes formula now considered the defacto standard in risk-pricing...

Geeks appear more at home in Soviet Russia because they have the arrogance to believe they can outsmart tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people. So have the people involved in the above-named organizations...

You re-stated my assertion that Jefferson ultimately supported Patents, as if it was a rebuttal.

Anyway, are you SURE you agree with Adam Smith?

"Adam Smith has sometimes been caricatured as someone who saw no role for government in economic life. In fact, he believed that government had an important role to play. Like most modern believers in free markets, Smith believed that the government should enforce contracts and grant patents and copyrights to encourage inventions and new ideas." [cite]

The quotes that people are using to claim that Smith was in fact anti-patent are misleading. Adam Smith believed that patents were necessary to encourage innovation.

See http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/08/viscus i_on_risk.html

It's a scam. The War on Terror is not about protecting anybody, it's about keeping Americans afraid. We are captors of our own cowardice.

Like all libertarians, he advocates rights for the rich, and slavery for the poor.

libertarianism provides only simple answers to complex questions

Poverty is one of America's most persistent and serious problems. The United States produces more per capita than any other industrialized country, and in recent years has devoted more than $500 billion per year, or about 12 percent of its gross national product, to public assistance and social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps, and Medicaid.
http://www.econlib.org/library/ENC/PovertyintheUni tedStates.html

The poverty problem is not essentially a money problem. We already spend fortunes of money on poverty programs, have for 40 years, and it's getting worse, not better.

People are not poor solely because they don't have money. There are many factors, and it's a complex problem. I submit to you that there are several things that could be done to dramatically reduce poverty in the US, and few of them require throwing more government-managed dollars at the issue.

The core issues revolve around what people consider to be an acceptable living standard in our culture, and what is "normal."

People who are able to work should work.
People should not borrow money for things that depreciate.
People who don't understand the consequences of borrowing money should not borrow money at all.
People who have no ability to earn an income should not start families.
People who do start families that way should lean predominantly on their family members to help provide food and shelter rather than turning to the government. If you can't pay rent on an apartment, then you should get roommates to help pay the bills. This is common in other cultures. In my neighborhood there are several first-generation immigrant families. Most of them rely on family members and non-family members to help pay the mortgage. To those of us who are not immigrants, this seems unacceptable. Why? Because we're spoiled.

I do have compassion for people, and know that there are some people who just cannot make it on their own. (Mental handicap, physical infirmity, crushing medical bills, etc.)

As I see it, the largest root cause of the poverty problem is
a) People are not willing to get the education that they need to provide the earning opportunities that are needed.
b) If they do have an education, they are unwilling to work hard and consistently to earn money.
c) If they do earn money, they do stupid things with it. e.g. play the lottery, borrow money to buy cars, run credit cards to the limits for crap they don't need, 100% mortgages with interest-only options, and
d) then get overextended, borrowing to their credit limit where they are abused by financial institutions who are driven by shareholders who care about profitability more than whether these companies are abusing people to drive up profits. These mortgages and credit cards should never have been issued in the first place. Those people could not afford to borrow that money.
e) refuse to learn how to develop relationship skills, and they buy into the lie that divorce solves your relational problems. As a result, children are thrown into poverty because the income that was insufficient to cover one household now is split to try to cover expenses for two households.

There are many things we can do to help reduce poverty. Most of them involve getting people to stop living above their means, learn to sacrifice a bit, hold people accountable for bad choices, and teach relational skills so that families are not broken into multiple households. It's not a money problem, it's predominately a character problem, and that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the money being spent in the war on terror.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

I have done it, many times. I read blogs, email, etc. on my phone, studied for tests, read magazines, and so forth while driving too. I even change clothes -- everything except my boxers -- while driving. I've done so regularly for years. And how many accidents have I had?

Zero.

It comes down to prioritization and common sense. I didn't say I read *efficiently* while driving -- I certainly don't operate anywhere nearly as quickly on my reading/writing/etc. while driving as I do when I'm not engaged in driving. I check the road ahead of me and to the sides once every second or two, then glance down at my text to be read, get a line or sentence, then look up again at traffic while I process that line/sentence. I don't do these things at all in severely-inclement weather: snow, ice, heavy rain, high winds. Nor do I do them in situations where traffic conditions are changing rapidly: at high speed with lots of merging traffic, in crowded downtown streets with lots of pedestrians, along twisty mountain roads, etc.. I do it primarily in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go, sub-10 mi/hour traffic where, if an accident were to occur, it almost certainly would not be serious.

The simple fact is that we are not all created equal and we do not all evolve equally-fast or in the same directions. Some people are competent to perform actions which are dangerous if managed poorly, while others are not. I'm not competent to do something as dangerous as landing an airplane -- but plenty of trained pilots are; the mentally insane (as the VA Tech shootings exemplified) are not competent to use firearms safely, and nor are (IMO) people convicted of any violent crimes - but most other people are, or would be with sufficient training & education.

A better approach, rather than banning an activity outright, would be to test an individual's competence to perform the activity. An outright ban is too broad and inspecific; it has all the surgical precision of the Bush administration's "it's for national security" argument used to justify its actions...

The Walker folks have very good stats on their page. It is worth reading those to see hwo some of the /. posters should have done a little more research. Furthermore, there is a link to LiveInk To Go http://www.liveink.com/LiveInkToGoReadingOnline.ht m that will transform your text into the new format. I copied Bastiat's "The Law" http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss2a.ht ml into the parsing window, and it was MUCH easier to read and follow. Try it.

I dunno how you define "works". And, middle ground fallacy.

I'd have to strongly disagree. First of all, in my experience, the intellectual quality of bloggers really puts syndicated columnists to shame. (I'm talking about the upper end of them -- no doubt you can find lots of bad quality.) They can write much more and link to the basis for their claims. If anything is in error, they'll typically have comment and trackback capability so others can instantly expose them. Rarely will columnists deign to defend their assertions. After reading blogs for a few years, I checked back to some of the syndicated columns I had read (this is what I had in mind) and just marveled at how intellectually shallow they were. In contrast, check out this list of some of the blogs I read:

http://econlog.econlib.org/
http://www.overcomingbias.com/
http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/
http://www.janegalt.net/
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
http://patrick.net/wp/

Several of those are professors. Now, tell me they're not more refined than the columns you'd read in the paper.

Amusingly, Arnold Kling has a couple interesting bits in EconLog today about bias and avoiding truth. If you're interested.

In this case, my opinion doesn't happen to match yours. You don't think I came to my decision "properly", so you're avoiding the truth (I can form opinions however the hell I want) by looking for bias. It's a classic "Type M Argument" - focused on motives rather than consequences.

Regardless of my logic, or lack thereof, I'm making a "Type C Argument" (focused on the consequences). I believe that selecting the Zune has preferable results to selecting the iPod, because I'm examining the consequences of choosing a player that receives inadequate or undesirable support from the company that produces it.

Whether you agree that this is an important consideration is completely irrelevant to the type of argument it comprises. The consequences of choosing the wrong color media player are infinitesimal, while the consequences of a too-small screen are real medical problems. I'm still talking consequences, while the opposition is reduced to talking motives.

Arnold Kling does not work for or at Microsoft.

Amusingly, Arnold Kling has a couple interesting bits in EconLog today about bias and avoiding truth. If you're interested.

In this case, my opinion doesn't happen to match yours. You don't think I came to my decision "properly", so you're avoiding the truth (I can form opinions however the hell I want) by looking for bias. It's a classic "Type M Argument" - focused on motives rather than consequences.

Regardless of my logic, or lack thereof, I'm making a "Type C Argument" (focused on the consequences). I believe that selecting the Zune has preferable results to selecting the iPod, because I'm examining the consequences of choosing a player that receives inadequate or undesirable support from the company that produces it.

Whether you agree that this is an important consideration is completely irrelevant to the type of argument it comprises. The consequences of choosing the wrong color media player are infinitesimal, while the consequences of a too-small screen are real medical problems. I'm still talking consequences, while the opposition is reduced to talking motives.

Arnold Kling does not work for or at Microsoft.

I'm surpised the Mankiw piece got linked without mentioning a someone similar piece by Prof. Bryan Caplan (who himself links the Mankiw piece) that summarizes his upcoming book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Long story short, he argues that because people don't personally bear the cost of holding ridiculous political beliefs, they relax their standards of intellectual rigor, similar to how they do with religious beliefs. They thus use voting to appeal to their "feel good" side rather than seriously analyze the issues (like the would with, e.g. their own finances), resulting in destructive policies all-around.

So he takes Mankiw one step further and says that it's not just ignorance that's a problem, but irrationality. If it were mere ignorance, the errors would cancel. But, Caplan, claims, they don't -- they skew the wrong way.

Just support GNURadio and spread spectrum technologies. Proprietization of the spectrum will go obsolete.

Read up:
http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Columns/Klingwirele ss.html

Happiness as a measure of a nation? Oh please.

Nobody has yet even come *close* to defining an objective standard by which "happiness" can be measured. You can find some back-and-forth occasionally on the subject between a couple of generally (though not specifically) like-minded economists on Econlog.

Anybody who goes around quoting statistics as meaningless as measures of "happiness" -- especially on such an amorphous, wide-variation-within-the-set scale as an entire freaking nation -- is not somebody who can be taken seriously. It is a laughable statistic, at best.

"Happiness" is an entirely (and almost by definition) subjective thing, and as such, the only serious objective measures cannot come from the rankings of those people measuring it from outside the body, but rather from inside the brain, where the chemical and physical processes that -- physically -- define "happiness" in our brains can be measured.

Of course, saying this is the most-objective way of measuring happiness, and *doing* it are two very different things... But until such measurements can be taken, easily and repeatably, with high degrees of accuracy and precision, the idea that happiness can be measured to any level better than a few broad, vague, subjective classifications (e.g. "very unhappy", "unhappy", "neutral", "happy", "very happy"), will remain completely laughable.

Happiness as a measure of a nation? Oh please.

Nobody has yet even come *close* to defining an objective standard by which "happiness" can be measured. You can find some back-and-forth occasionally on the subject between a couple of generally (though not specifically) like-minded economists on Econlog.

Anybody who goes around quoting statistics as meaningless as measures of "happiness" -- especially on such an amorphous, wide-variation-within-the-set scale as an entire freaking nation -- is not somebody who can be taken seriously. It is a laughable statistic, at best.

"Happiness" is an entirely (and almost by definition) subjective thing, and as such, the only serious objective measures cannot come from the rankings of those people measuring it from outside the body, but rather from inside the brain, where the chemical and physical processes that -- physically -- define "happiness" in our brains can be measured.

Of course, saying this is the most-objective way of measuring happiness, and *doing* it are two very different things... But until such measurements can be taken, easily and repeatably, with high degrees of accuracy and precision, the idea that happiness can be measured to any level better than a few broad, vague, subjective classifications (e.g. "very unhappy", "unhappy", "neutral", "happy", "very happy"), will remain completely laughable.

Wait, you're saying our telecom and cable industries are unregulated? Sheesh, things are hopeless for libertarianism if anyone thinks the US is unregulated.

Of course, I'm not saying everyone would have cheaper internet access if the telecom were truly deregulated. The point of a free market is effeciency, not cheap internet. And, of course, TANSTAAFL. Max marginal tax rate in 1990: Sweden: 65%; US: 33%.

Oh, and regarding Cuba: http://www.overpopulation.com/articles/2002/000019 .html

Marginal tax rates: http://www.econlib.org/library/enc/MarginalTaxRate s.html

"The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton. In an influential article titled "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action," Merton identified five sources of unanticipated consequences. The first two--and the most pervasive--were ignorance and error."

Found that here. Might be a place to start.

Looking into your suggestion, I read a review of Ishmael, and it does sound quite interesting. Somehow it makes me think of the new Will Wright game: Spore (about evolution, civilization, society, and survival).

I did a some research (i.e. a quick Googling), and the answer on where Malthus' 1798 predictions went wrong seems to be mostly that he didn't anticipate modern agriculture or transporation (the combine harvester, steamship, train, etc), something you can hardly blame him for.

1) So the Earth is warming up. The consequences -- negative *and* positive -- of this are...?

2) How about some better empirics?

Yep. That's Public Choice Theory in a nutshell.

The Economics of the Wireless Last Mile

Beginning in the sixties, economists performed empirical tests confirming that investment in private R&D yields a positive return. This finding holds up for studies of R&D in general and in particular industries. Recent findings by Lichtenberg and Siegel reported an estimated rate of return of 35 percent for company-funded R&D. The older literature they surveyed reported an average rate of return of 29 percent. This is evidence of remarkable stability in the estimates of the rate of return to privately funded R&D. When Lichtenberg and Siegel decomposed R&D into basic and applied, they found that the rate of return to basic R&D was 134 percent, compared to the two older findings of 178 percent and 231 percent. When the rate of return, even after falling, is still in triple digits, one suspects underinvestment.

I disagree that most economists would view efficiency as something determined by a value judgement. Whether a market is efficient or not has to do with whether goods are allocated to those with the highest willingness to pay for them, and allowing price to function properly as a signal of the value a good or service has. In this way, resources will flow to where they will be most productive. I'm not sure where value judgments or any normative statements/analysis enter the picture.

Interesting link, dieoff.org. Where did you study economics?

"It is about being cheap.
Take a country with no borders so you don't have to deal with foreigners for the following bit.

If a country had a totally free healthcare system where each person gets the medical aid they need. What need would that country have of an ID system for medical care."

Brilinet, its called the NWO, the only country without boriders one could have would be a united earth goverment, even then im sure the conspircy buffs would tell you aliens walk amounst us accessing our free helthcare, but as australia has not only borders, but we allow ppl who are not citizen into our contry to vist, then we want a way to stop these free loaders diping into our free system.

"There is a reason most countries don't have truly free medical care. It is expensive and requires the majority of people to pay for medical care they don't personally receive.

It is socialism and socialists have high tax bills. That doesn't get you elected anymore."

I like my socialist goverment with a top marginal tax rate of 47 cents.
And the average wage erner ($52,000 IIRC) is in the 30cent range.
http://www.ato.gov.au/businesses/content.asp?doc=/ content/12333.htm&pc=001/003/019/001/006&mnu=601&m fp=001/003&st=&cy=1

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MarginalTaxRate s.html
note how most countrys have a downwards trend, and note that Australia has kept a downwards trend whilst also implemnting the free medical care, and for mos tof that time having free unis. Though I do have the gripe that these days you only get a verry low intrest lone for your uni, but hay, what do you exprect the govemnt to do when you can go and get a degree in Madona, brinty spears or what ever.

"Do you know how much of your car insurance goes into a general pool that is used by all insurers to cover people without insurance? Yeah, that is right. Your paying for that asswipe who has no car insurance. Nice eh?"

yup, were working on that, compusly 3rd party insurancefor any registerd car.

In europe (where the typical worker productivity is higher than in the US)

Patent Law Views from EconLog

Sounded convincing to me. But I believe you (too)... if I want to "drop any stupid carrier like the Bells" (Verizon in my case) how do I do that? Get another ISP or build a home hotspot, or _________?

An economic analysis on the sale of human organs.

6000 Americans will die this year because of the lack of available organs. A (regulated) market could ensure this doesn't occur.

"I suggest that you review Economics 101, giving special attention to the reasonings of Malthus"

Malthus, or the many that he likely plagiarized? (1761, "Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence" by a certain son of Scotland named Wallace.)

In any case, I give this.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS5.html

The minutes of the FOMC are released 3 weeks after a meeting. Rates do not change on a whim. Go read up on modern macroeconomics.

I think some good additional reading would be the essay "I, Pencil". It is an essay about capitalism, but... I definitely think it applies here.

Milton Friedman had to say about this essay:

Leonard Read's delightful story, "I, Pencil," has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand--the possibility of cooperation without coercion--and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that "will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."

People cooperate without coersion on open source projects. There are a variety of reasons why they may do so, one of which is certainly... Economics.

You left out the steps where you:

• refine petroleum to make plastic for IC bodies
• mine metal ores to make IC legs and board traces
• grow SiO2 crystals to etch into IC dies
• etc.

Given that the manufacturing of a pencil is this complicated, the phrase "from scratch" ceases to have much meaning for anything more complex than, say, fruit salad.

(And the Sun, birds, and bees might have a thing or two to say about that...)

This is a very good idea. The cost of roads has nothing to do with what fuel your car uses, but gasoline taxes are currently the best way to get drivers to pay for roads.

Having intelligent streets that can automatically charge you for your share of the driving makes plenty of sense. Further, it might finally spawn the use of private roads, where companies would compete with the government on a per-mile cost of maintenance.

Note that this needn't be a GPS system. The most expensive roads could just have toll gates.

This, along with all public surveillance, should have a great deal of oversight.

Some economists are proposing legislation that would create a cabinet level post whose entire job is to act as watch-dog to any group doing domestic public surveillance. You can read a bit about it here

Slashdot has never been a haven of economically-literate people. People here are computer geeks; they have little, if any interest in business, finance, or economics, and indeed, many are openly-hostile to the very *idea* that such systems work as described.

Nevermind that well over 90% of all economists, both in academia and in the business world, agree that free trade is good for trading nations and that price controls (already enjoying support in a post to this very topic) are a proven failure. Slashdotters, like most economically-left-leaning people, make-believe that the entire study of economics is one giant conspiracy against mankind (because much economics study disproves their ideology they want to make-believe actually works when in practice it does not); that *somehow*, there is no scarcity of goods in the world. Nevermind the Law of Conservation found in physics says the same thing -- this is Slashdot, and on Slashdot, we don't like facts!

Most Slashdotters, being high school or college students, I would hazard a guess have never taken an economics course in their lives. Slashdotters, categorically-speaking, are economically-illiterate, and no matter how many times you beat them with the cluesticks of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, or Arnold Kling, you find that the generally-socialist population of Slashdot refuses to learn, because they are blinded by their dreams and ideals that can never be and which ultimately failed in practice 15 years ago. There is no reputable economist in the western world at this point that promotes socialism and communism to the extent that most Slashdotters do; even the "old guard" of socialist economics (John Kenneth Galbraith, George Stigler, and to a lesser-extent (though from which the former two derive their work), J.M. Keynes) have started fading-away in light of economic reality.

In terms of overall economic design, pure socialism failed, true communism was never actually achieved by the Soviets or anybody else (though Chairman Mao came close), and free market capitalism emerged victorious. That is the political-economic conclusion of the 20th century.

Yet, Slashdotters remain clueless to economic history, theory, econometrics, etc.. For such "intelligent" people, they sure like to remain ignorant!

Me, I'm one of those rare people who actively seeks out intersections between the computing and economics worlds. But you will find very few people (perhaps a dozen or so) like me here unfortunately...

Others have described this as "The Tragedy of the Commons." Have a stretch of pasture where anyone can graze their cattle for free, and it'll soon be overgrazed. Have a stretch of the spectrum that anyone can freely use, and it'll become overused, so much so that no one gets any benefit.

I saw that in a town I visited where the water was unmetered. A local told me that at first it seemed a good idea. Water was so cheap and abundant, why go to the cost of metering and billing by usage? But unmetered led to waste and waste led to a search for new sources that turned out to be expensive. The result was that everyone, whether they wasted or not, had to paid sky-high water bills.

I hate to sound like a scold, but we need to make like good little hobbits and not trash our Technological Shire. We are going to have to discipline ourselves not to waste what's free. If wired can do the job with a trifling more effort (and probably less cost), we need use wire. Reserve wireless where it's necessary or particularly handy.

--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien

This fallacy is revealed in I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read which explains that while not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make a pencil , pencils nonetheless exist in abundance.

The Reality of Markets by Russell Roberts speaks of "phenomena that are the product of human action but not of human design": examples include language, economies and the WWW, all which work with neither oversight nor designer.

In contrast many designed systems (CORBA, The Semantic Web, RDF, Ontologies) remain stunted and show little progress. Clay Shirky's writings: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work and The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview provide illuminating insight into why.

This fallacy is revealed in I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read which explains that while not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make a pencil , pencils nonetheless exist in abundance.

The Reality of Markets by Russell Roberts speaks of "phenomena that are the product of human action but not of human design": examples include language, economies and the WWW, all which work with neither oversight nor designer.

In contrast many designed systems (CORBA, The Semantic Web, RDF, Ontologies) remain stunted and show little progress. Clay Shirky's writings: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work and The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview provide illuminating insight into why.

Right-thinking americans (who are, of course, in the majority) raly to our cause. The washington kleptocracy is o'erthrown. A new constitutional convention is held

majority? That I doubt. When the last revolution was fought, the loyalists were still the majority here.

Now, do you seriously believe that this convention results in the _absence_ of a federal government?

I never said I wanted an absence of a federal government. I want a minimalist one which sticks to its limited role as described within the constitution. E.G. national defense, weights& measures, minting and thats about it.

Here's a better question. The last five years have seen corporate malfeasance undreamt of since the era of the trusts. Why aren't you calling for the abolition of the corporation as a legal entity? Believe me the corps are a big part of the problem. Back when the country was founded there were very strict limits on corporations. I.E. a corp could only do business in its state of incorporation, AND could only do the business for which it was originally incorporated for. Thus no mega conglomerates in 25 different fields. I think the grant of corporate "personhood" to the railroads was one of the worst things ever to happen to this country.

Yeah, let's have a puny central bank, like russia. They're doing real well without inflation controls.

Im not sure you're getting my point here. We do not have inflation controls, we have GUARANTEED inflation "controls" for example, look here. the first and third graphs are interesting. Or this link

from the link above: "Whatever other problems there were with the gold standard, persistent inflation was not one of them. Between 1880 and 1914, the period when the United States was on the "classical gold standard," inflation averaged only 0.1 percent per year."

So how does 0.1 percent strike you versus the FED standard of 4.0 percent for inflationary controls? I'd say pretty damn good. It meant that if you were poor you could save your money and count on it being worth the same amount year to year. Try a compound comparison of $100.00 for 20 years. With the fed, in 20 years your 100.00 is worth $46.00 without, $98.00.

Amtrak sucks

Did you miss my caveat about good management, or just ignore it?

Nope, but can you tell me was there ever a period after it was nationalized that amtrak did not suck? For as long as I can remember Amtrak has lost money. Do you really think such a systemic problem can be blamed on bad mangagement, or upon the system (government owned and operated) itself?

The crucial difference between our points of view is that while we both think that a single entity is responsible or the world being a tiolet (you - the government, me - corporations) you call for abolition while I call for reform.

I say they are both responsible. But let me ask you a question....

Would you agree that power corrupts individuals?

If so, why is your answer to that problem the greater concentration of power in fewer hands?

Put another way, sure my local official may be corrupt, but I have a better chance of seeing that corruption on a daily basis, and a greater chance of voting him out, versus corruption in the back rooms of washington. This IMO is why like 55% of the populace does not vote. They feel powerless to change the crap that matters.

Only in the mind of it's advocates.

Additionally there is absolutely no way to implement Libertarian socialism.

That is entirely correct. They havn't added anything to the debate that wasn't already covered. See this for detailed criticism.