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Conveniently ignoring the fact that most current debt and taxes have nothing to do with war or armies?

I have to say that this is exactly what FDR had to do during the depression. People were starving and he had guys going out and slaughtering pigs and leaving them to rot... Otherwise the price would never rise; I couldn't imagine having to try to explain that, let alone make the executive decision to have it done.

I wouldn't try to use that argument in support of copyright laws if I were you. The reason why such actions would be difficult to justify is that they were the wrong actions. The Depression was the inevitable consequence of prices that were too high, a result of monetary expansion and easy credit during the period leading up to 1929. The change in policy from laisse-faire to active intervention, price controls, and the sort of willful waste of resources you brought up are the primary reason the Great Depression lasted for so long when all the prior depressions corrected themselves, typically in under a year. Depressions are symptoms of malinvestment; FDR forcibly maintained the malinvestments, causing the symptoms to drag on long after they would have otherwise brought about their own cure. The end of the Depression was brought about mostly by the start of WWII, not by FDR's policies.

You can find a far more detailed analysis of the economics of the Depression here: America's Great Depression.

Central planning will always fail. Those aren't centrally planed economies, they are just hampered economies.

And lead to the destruction of many economies due to lack of liquidity. You also have the potential issue of localized booming markets (eg China) causing global deflation. (. . .) The richness of a country is not just what it produces, but also what it can acquire through trade. That's why countries stockpile tradable resources such as gold, dollars, and more recently the euro, rather than just any piece of paper or metal.

You clearly think along Keynesian macroeconomic lines. To refute your reasoning, thus, I would have to provide you a full course on classical liberalism coupled to a detailed refutation of Keynes, something I'm not on a position to do.

As such, I'll limit myself to point you where you can download all the books you want and more demolishing Keynes and some more: the ebook repository at the Mises Institute website. Start with Mises own Human Action and proceed from there.

In regards to your specific points, I can offer some comments, but I'm sure they're going to sound incomplete without the above basis. In any case, here're them:

a) Liquidity is a meaningless parameter. The amount of money available, or rather, the number you attach to incommensurable goods, services etc. to which you attribute subjective valuations, does not make a country to produce more or less. The real economy is always an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. Money makes what would otherwise be a barter system more efficient in that it makes everyone save time by not having to construct by themselves a chain of "who wants what" to be able to make deals, but that's it. Remove completely all kinds of money, be them paper or metals, and you still have a market obeying the exact same rules and suffering from the exact same shortcoming when tampered by government.

b) Deflation isn't a problem. In a market without government interference, prices as a whole have no reason at all to increase. Increases and decreases in prices are localized. Some areas have price increases because demand increased, others have price decreases because demand decreased, and that's it. Everything in this regards is nothing more than markets self-regulating, and a global deflation would be exactly that: the global market self-readjusting prices due to offer and demand.

c) In regards to the richness of a country, you're right in that it comes also from what it can acquire through trade, but wrong that this depends on how much reserves it has. I guess you believe in the "balance of trade" concept. When thought in terms of balance of money flows, it has little meaning, because you're looking at the wrong parameter. When you look at what is actually being exchanged, then you have the real balance of trade, and it's always perfectly balanced. The goods and services that came out from a country have been exchanged by the goods and services that entered that country. And that's it. An actual imbalance is impossible.

The similarity of one can be made by way of promises ("I promise you that if you provide me this right now for less than you would require otherwise, I'll provide you something tomorrow for less than I would require otherwise"), which money in the end is. Since promises can be valued (you trust the country that's promising you), you also "purchase" them (pretty much like a service, nonetheless!). If the promise is kept, so good. If not, if it's broken, the market will readjust itself to take that into account. But at any given time, everything that went out (promises included) was exchanged by everything that came in (promises included), and thus, no imbalance can exist, ever.

To have all of this detailed I suggest you search for "keynes" in the Mises Institute website. There are more than 2,000 ar

And lead to the destruction of many economies due to lack of liquidity. You also have the potential issue of localized booming markets (eg China) causing global deflation. (. . .) The richness of a country is not just what it produces, but also what it can acquire through trade. That's why countries stockpile tradable resources such as gold, dollars, and more recently the euro, rather than just any piece of paper or metal.

You clearly think along Keynesian macroeconomic lines. To refute your reasoning, thus, I would have to provide you a full course on classical liberalism coupled to a detailed refutation of Keynes, something I'm not on a position to do.

As such, I'll limit myself to point you where you can download all the books you want and more demolishing Keynes and some more: the ebook repository at the Mises Institute website. Start with Mises own Human Action and proceed from there.

In regards to your specific points, I can offer some comments, but I'm sure they're going to sound incomplete without the above basis. In any case, here're them:

a) Liquidity is a meaningless parameter. The amount of money available, or rather, the number you attach to incommensurable goods, services etc. to which you attribute subjective valuations, does not make a country to produce more or less. The real economy is always an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. Money makes what would otherwise be a barter system more efficient in that it makes everyone save time by not having to construct by themselves a chain of "who wants what" to be able to make deals, but that's it. Remove completely all kinds of money, be them paper or metals, and you still have a market obeying the exact same rules and suffering from the exact same shortcoming when tampered by government.

b) Deflation isn't a problem. In a market without government interference, prices as a whole have no reason at all to increase. Increases and decreases in prices are localized. Some areas have price increases because demand increased, others have price decreases because demand decreased, and that's it. Everything in this regards is nothing more than markets self-regulating, and a global deflation would be exactly that: the global market self-readjusting prices due to offer and demand.

c) In regards to the richness of a country, you're right in that it comes also from what it can acquire through trade, but wrong that this depends on how much reserves it has. I guess you believe in the "balance of trade" concept. When thought in terms of balance of money flows, it has little meaning, because you're looking at the wrong parameter. When you look at what is actually being exchanged, then you have the real balance of trade, and it's always perfectly balanced. The goods and services that came out from a country have been exchanged by the goods and services that entered that country. And that's it. An actual imbalance is impossible.

The similarity of one can be made by way of promises ("I promise you that if you provide me this right now for less than you would require otherwise, I'll provide you something tomorrow for less than I would require otherwise"), which money in the end is. Since promises can be valued (you trust the country that's promising you), you also "purchase" them (pretty much like a service, nonetheless!). If the promise is kept, so good. If not, if it's broken, the market will readjust itself to take that into account. But at any given time, everything that went out (promises included) was exchanged by everything that came in (promises included), and thus, no imbalance can exist, ever.

To have all of this detailed I suggest you search for "keynes" in the Mises Institute website. There are more than 2,000 ar

The Impossibility of Taxing Only Consumption

Having challenged the merits of the goal of taxing only consumption and freeing savings from taxation, we now proceed to deny the very possibility of achieving that goal, i.e., we maintain that a consumption tax will devolve, willy-nilly, into a tax on income and therefore on savings as well. In short, that even if, for the sake of argument, we should want to tax only consumption and not income, we should not be able to do so.

Let us take, first, the Fisher plan, which, seemingly straightforward, would exempt saving and tax only consumption. Let us take Mr. Jones, who earns an annual income of $100,000. His time preferences lead him to spend 90 percent of his income on consumption, and save-and-invest the other 10 percent. On this assumption, he will spend $90,000 a year on consumption, and save-and-invest the other $10,000. Let us assume now that the government levies a 20 percent tax on Jones's income, and that his time-preference schedule remains the same. The ratio of his consumption to savings will still be 90:10, and so, after-tax income now being $80,000, his consumption spending will be $72,000 and his saving-investment $8,000 per year. [9]

Suppose now that instead of an income tax, the government follows the Irving Fisher scheme, and levies a 20 percent annual tax on Jones's consumption. Fisher maintained that such a tax would fall only on consumption, and not on Jones's savings. But this claim is incorrect, since Jones's entire savings-investment is based solely on the possibility of his future consumption, which will be taxed equally. Since future consumption will be taxed, we assume, at the same rate as consumption at present, we cannot conclude that savings in the long run receives any tax exemption or special encouragement. There will therefore be no shift by Jones in favor of savings-and-investment due to a consumption tax. [10] In sum, any payment of taxes to the government, whether they be consumption or income, necessarily reduces Jones's net income. Since his time preference schedule remains the same, Jones will therefore reduce his consumption and his savings proportionately. The consumption tax will be shifted by Jones until it becomes equivalent to a lower rate of tax on his own income. If Jones still spends 90 percent of his net income on consumption, and 10 percent on savings-investment, his net income will be reduced by $15,000, instead of $20,000, and his consumption will now total $76,000, and his savings-investment $9,000. In other words, Jones's 20 percent consumption tax will become equivalent to a 15 percent tax on his income, and he will arrange his consumption-savings proportions accordingly. [11]

That's a bit of cash flowing around...

Did you ever fear being gunned down like a dog while running your shell account?

There is some doubt you would have had this fear in the "wild west" anyway. http://www.mises.org/story/1449 There would probably be places in the now "civilised" US that you would be more likely to be killed than in the wild west.

"in many places like Dodge City, tales of violence were actually accentuated to appeal to the tourist trade in the latter years of the Frontier."

"the excitement in the Old West in general has been much overstated. All the big cattle towns of Kansas combined saw a total of 45 murders during the period of 1870-1885. Dodge City alone saw 15 people die violently from 1876-1885--an average of 1.5 per year. Deadwood, South Dakota and Tombstone, Arizona (home of the O.K. Corral), during their worst years of violence saw four and five murders respectively. Vigilante violence appears to not have been much worse."

It is precisely the greed that means there is always competition, as long as potential competitors can find a better way to do it and they aren't hampered in entering the industry there will be competition. I think not allowing government in the first place to enter this field is more beneficial overall because they would not be tempted to expand further. For instance, if it did work in one area, then they would try again in something else, and in 20 years they'd be regulating everything and the positive effects of the original idea would be far outweighed by the negative effects of them expanding into the anti-trust areas. (For example, most anti-trust cases are firms complaining about rivals, not customers complaining.) Also, just the threat of potential competition and now wanting people to spend their money on something (dollar competition) else will mean they can't take too much "advantage" of customers.

Lets face it, if people weren't greedy and lazy chasing the ultimate goal of taking a portion of the production of others rather than producing themselves, then communism (as an economic system) would be an ideal system.

I'm afraid I must completely disagree here because even if everyone would work as hard as they could for everyone else there is still a more fundamental problem with socialism/communism. There is no rational way of allocating available resources because there is no price system. The planners are so disabled without the price information it will never work. Unless somehow everyone's brain is attached to a super powerful computer :-) but that's just perverse.

Government regulations do not stop unsafe food, unsafe working conditions and the like (which I know you didn't claim) but the idea they are much better than self regulation I think is erroneous. There will always be problems in this area because, as you say, it is human nature. If people have bad experiences they won't come back and they tell many people. Also, there's loads of ways that can spread the information about a bad company, and this is only easier with modern communications. For example, there are consumers reports, companies that voluntarily regulate and allow their customers to show a seal of quality. Ebay does a similar thing with the rating system. People should be responsible for their actions so if they sell something bad or commit fraud they should be punished and be made to pay restitution.

I agree with your take on removing protections for officers and investors, they should be held accountable. They need to take responsibility, there could be insurance companies that specialise in such things, they would hardly be willing to insure companies that are irresponsible and would cost them money! The toxic waste example is a perfect example of where property rights are not respected (not just the land, the people's bodies and lives that are affected too.)

It is a pity that in the industrial age the courts did not seek to uphold the property rights of the victims of pollution (e.g. orchid owners and people who breath! :=) ) Apart from being downright immoral it also meant that there was no incentive to take such actions as using cleaner coal and inventing filtration systems.

OK, so that wasn't really fair. :-)

Here's the executive summary: http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm

Some more references:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Martin041109En
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/21/business/wh o.php
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,73 69,665969,00.html
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again st.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman200207 25
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory .cfm?story_id=5014990

"Within the past five or six years, economists in particular have started to question the USPTO's practices, finding little correlation, if any, between patent proliferation and invention. Economists have identified many situations in which patents actually retard the introduction of new products. "
http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

#4 Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

...

-13 things that do not make sense

...

History

The American Medical Association (AMA) was founded in 1847 around two propositions: one, all doctors should have a "suitable education" and two, a "uniform elevated standard of requirements for the degree of M.D. should be adopted by all medical schools in the U.S." [1] In the days of its founding AMA was much more open--at its conferences and in its publications--about its real goal: building a government-enforced monopoly for the purpose of dramatically increasing physician incomes. It eventually succeeded, becoming the most formidable labor union on the face of the earth.

AMA's initial drive to increase physician incomes was motivated by increasing competition from homeopaths (AMA allopaths use treatments--usually synthetic--that produce effects different from the diseases being treated while homeopaths use treatments--usually natural--that produce effects similar to those of the disease being treated). This competition did serious damage to the incomes of AMA allopaths. In the year before AMA's founding, the New York Journal of Medicine stated that competition with homeopathy caused "a large pecuniary loss" to allopaths. [2] In the same issue, the dean of the school of medicine at the University of Michigan railed against competition because it made treating sickness "arduous and un-remunerative." [3]

Apart from reversing rapidly declining incomes, allopaths also wanted to rescue their public reputations, which quite reasonably suffered given their proficiency in killing patients through such crude practices as bloodletting ("exsanguination") or mercury injections (poisoning). A few allopaths desired adulation normally reserved for star athletes and actors. The Massachusetts Medical Society opined in 1848 that physicians should be "looked upon by the mass of mankind with a veneration almost superstitious." [4] ...

-100 Years of Medical Robbery

• The Real 'Inconvenient Truth'
• Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics
• The Deniers
• New findings indicate today's greenhouse gas levels not unusual
• Global Warming as a Religion
• I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train (By David Evans)
• GREENIE WATCH
• (Streaming video) The Great Global Warming Swindle - Documentary Film
• 'The global-warmers were bound to attack, but why are they so feeble?'

deflation -> everybody saves their money instead of spending it

It's the other way around. Given a fixed money supply and a general increase in goods, the demand curve for money will rise, causing prices for goods to fall. You're suggesting that deflation (a change in price) causes everyone to save their money (a change in the demand curve for money), but prices do not change supply or demand curves; rather, prices are set by supply and demand curves. Thus,

more goods -> greater demand for money (i.e. people are more willing to hold money) -> prices of goods fall (i.e. deflation)

Now, prices falling may cause speculators to anticipate that prices will fall even more, but speculation is self-correcting. When the speculators attempt to increase the value of money by hoarding it, they have to eventually "cash in" on their speculation by spending their money. When that happens, the price of money will fall back to the price set by the underlying forces of supply and demand.

everybody saves their money instead of spending it -> lower demand

It's true that an increase in demand for money means a decrease in demand for goods, but only in terms of money. In other words, nominal prices have fallen, but there's no reason to believe that real prices have changed. Therefore, why should we expect any change in production?

To make it more clear, let me use a quote from Man, Economy, and State, Chapter 11:

"An increased demand for money, then, tends to lower prices all around without changing time preference or the pure rate of interest. Thus, suppose total social income is 100, with 70 allocated to investment and 30 to consumption. The demand for money increases, so that people decide to hoard a total of 20. Expenditure will now be 80 instead of 100, 20 being added to cash balances. Income in the next period will be only 80, since expenditures in one period result in the identical income to be allocated to the next period. If time preferences remain the same, then the proportion of investment to consumption in the society will remain roughly the same, i.e., 56 invested and 24 consumed. Prices and nominal money values and incomes fall all along the line, and we are left with the same capital structure, the same real income, the same interest rate, etc. The only things that have changed are nominal prices, which have fallen, and the proportion of total cash balances to money income, which has increased."

Well, I would have been interested in hearing you out further on the house/information thing, but I appreciate the time and effort you've put into discussing IP with me, which is well beyond what others are willing to do.

FWIW, I freely admit I don't have a position on IP. I think it's a complicated issue on which people often get lazy in justification. I am equally critical of those who argue in favor of it, although on /. there are far more people willing to point out the flaws in such arguments.

The scarcity argument is often associated with its major exponent, Stephan Kinsella, who developed it in a journal paper. Posting here under the handle "Person", I believe I got him to admit the error. It's a long discussion, but I'd invite you to see the posts around October 11, 2006 12:56 PM. Please note his short fuse, and inability to read what I actually post.

This might give you an idea of what 'libertarian socialism' is:

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1132&i d=70

What good is the right to life if you can't afford food?

If food is so expensive, rare and precious that YOU cannot get any, then I think it shows either that you're totally irresponsible (incapable of taking care of your own most basic needs) - in which case I fail to see why "someone" should hold me or anyone else at gunpoint so you get to be fed forcefully ; or that no one in the world wants you to stay alive (otherwise they'd arrange for you to get food) - in which case you'll never find any such "someone" to help you at the expense of others. In any case, it's not a problem of you being poor. I guess I should ask you "What good is it to have the State take care of feeding people if there is no food at all in the first place ?" but that would be bringing myself down to your level.

Where is liberty if all land is private, and you own none?

As a matter of fact, I do not own any land, and all land on this planet is owned by individuals or by states. Yet, my liberty gets plenty of exercise, so I fail to see your point. Perhaps that is because I am familiar with the concept of homesteading and you're not.

Libertarians forget that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. They want the freedom to do whatever they want without the responsibility that goes with it.

Quite the contrary, actually. If you learn what libertarianism really is about, you'll see how absolutely wrong this affirmation of yours is.

Ah, the "free advertising" bullshit. Pirates use arguments like this to justify stealing EVERYBODY'S stuff, not just the ones who have turned a blind eye on purpose

Ahhh yes, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute,
that radical hotbed of piracy and socialist thought who constantly crusade for the rights of the thief over those of the honest producer of goods and services.

Maybe you should pay attention to who it is that is making the argument this time, notice that they are absolutely enamored of free markets, and deal with their arguments at face value.

Hell, "Overly critical". Hardly.

My original citation was to John Gatto's work. You'd said that you thought "the other coward" was fabricating a statement "about [factory] labor 'drying up' quickly". My original post was to provide a resource that confirms "the other coward's" statement.

No. Your source was not even trying to support that statement (about competing capitalists inadvertently drying up the labor pool and being unable to staff their factories profitably):

"I'm generally unfamiliar with the early years of industrialization and factories, but John Gatto does say in his Underground History of American Education [johntaylorgatto.com] that modern factory schools were established to provide workers for industry, and to train free people to become obedient 'consumers'."

It tried to support a subtly different statement, that modern schools "were started" for all kinds of heinous purposes, but NOT as a result of a general conspiracy of corporations. As I pointed out before, the original claim -- that corporations organized through some kind of gentlemen's agreement to pacify generations of otherwise independent-minded youth -- would force us to reject the bulk of anti-corporatist ideology by holding that corporations look 15+ years ahead, and that they use their own children as sacrificial lambs.

Remember, it's not enough to cite reams of sources -- they have to actually support a relevant claim you made.

The sobering truth is that the public school system, in each state, exists because it has phenomenal voter support predicated on all kinds of FUD about homeschooling, declining property values (for those who bought a house JUST to be in a good school district), and discrimination by privately-run schools. It's comforting, but wrong, to believe that it's just the evil rich behind this.

This bit about school being created to provide a labor force for early industrialists is crucial to the whole debate. Because, if it's true, then there is no such thing as a "free market" in America, as most of the market's participants have been mind-fucked without their even realizing it. Without their indoctrination in the government's schools, individuals would make substantially different choices in their lives, and the economy would be totally different...

Extreme overstatement. It merely means that the actors *within the market however free it may be* have different values. Perhaps they would have a higher preference for self-employment. But no proponent of capitalist considers emergent, common self-employment within an unregulated market to be "not capitalism" or "not a free market".

I'd much rather read original sources for your position

I wasn't providing a position; I was providing a reality-check for some extreme statements made by some ACs. As for the claims made here (and confining it to free internet stuff):

Regarding the claims from Carson's work, check out this issue of the JLS, specifically this one, which makes a lot of the same arguments I made here with citations.

For a summary of the environment-related points, Reisman again provides a good summary, starting on page 76 of this. (Huge file, but free.)

My original citation was to John Gatto's work. You'd said that you thought "the other coward" was fabricating a statement "about [factory] labor 'drying up' quickly". My original post was to provide a resource that confirms "the other coward's" statement.

No. Your source was not even trying to support that statement (about competing capitalists inadvertently drying up the labor pool and being unable to staff their factories profitably):

"I'm generally unfamiliar with the early years of industrialization and factories, but John Gatto does say in his Underground History of American Education [johntaylorgatto.com] that modern factory schools were established to provide workers for industry, and to train free people to become obedient 'consumers'."

It tried to support a subtly different statement, that modern schools "were started" for all kinds of heinous purposes, but NOT as a result of a general conspiracy of corporations. As I pointed out before, the original claim -- that corporations organized through some kind of gentlemen's agreement to pacify generations of otherwise independent-minded youth -- would force us to reject the bulk of anti-corporatist ideology by holding that corporations look 15+ years ahead, and that they use their own children as sacrificial lambs.

Remember, it's not enough to cite reams of sources -- they have to actually support a relevant claim you made.

The sobering truth is that the public school system, in each state, exists because it has phenomenal voter support predicated on all kinds of FUD about homeschooling, declining property values (for those who bought a house JUST to be in a good school district), and discrimination by privately-run schools. It's comforting, but wrong, to believe that it's just the evil rich behind this.

This bit about school being created to provide a labor force for early industrialists is crucial to the whole debate. Because, if it's true, then there is no such thing as a "free market" in America, as most of the market's participants have been mind-fucked without their even realizing it. Without their indoctrination in the government's schools, individuals would make substantially different choices in their lives, and the economy would be totally different...

Extreme overstatement. It merely means that the actors *within the market however free it may be* have different values. Perhaps they would have a higher preference for self-employment. But no proponent of capitalist considers emergent, common self-employment within an unregulated market to be "not capitalism" or "not a free market".

I'd much rather read original sources for your position

I wasn't providing a position; I was providing a reality-check for some extreme statements made by some ACs. As for the claims made here (and confining it to free internet stuff):

Regarding the claims from Carson's work, check out this issue of the JLS, specifically this one, which makes a lot of the same arguments I made here with citations.

For a summary of the environment-related points, Reisman again provides a good summary, starting on page 76 of this. (Huge file, but free.)

Okay, this seems kinda bullshit to me... Why are we trying to prove that piracy, an illegal act, is somehow "good"?...
The human power of rationalization is quite strong indeed; no one is stupid enough to think that piracy is legal, and obviously people feel bad about it, so they try and make up stories saying how they're actually helping people by doing it. Yes, there are definitely valid points that need to be examined, as I said before, but still, it's illegal, and everyone knows it, so stop trying to justify it.

In case you don't know this, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where this article came from, is very much a pro business and capitalism libertarian organization and they don't generally like theft, infringment, or other crimes robbing people. There is no way in which they would justify piracy. In this particular case they are simply arguing small scale piracy may help a business that is seeing it's product(s) pirated.

Also, see:

Ethics of Liberty, 15. "Human Rights" as Property Rights

> That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. If you're not allowed to do that, then you do not truly have freedom of speech.

What if the theater REALLY is on fire?!

That example is NOT about freedom of speech, but about property rights.

i.e.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/003070.asp

If you want the real story of why math and science teaching in the USA is so bad, see this about the collapse of the exponentially growing PhD pyramid scheme starting in the 1970s:
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
and also more by the same author (Dr. David Goodstein) here:
"Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates"
http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives .132.html
From that second link: "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned, cut and polished they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

What good does it do to make teachers happy with their salaries if the system they work in is fundamentally broken for todays' needs? You can even have both happy teachers and happy students -- but does that mean kids are learning and growing in good ways? An example of this is when teachers become entertainers, essentially feeding students the intellectual equivalent of candy all day, but everyone is happy (at least as long as the party lasts). Now, this is very different from the "hard fun"
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
John Holt, Seymour Papert, and others talk about (e.g. learning to play the piano well, or to build a complex robot like encouraged by Dean Kamen's FIRST programs http://www.usfirst.org/ ) and which children generally must choose for themselves to pursue if they are to get much out of it beyond misery.

Also, consider this Libertarian-oriented article on schooling:
"Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System"
http://www.mises.org/story/2216
"All the arguments in favor of a public provision of primary education prove to be unfounded and/or incorrect. The failure of the state to provide a high quality service to all (its explicit goal) has rendered public primary education illegitimate; and the immeasurable waste of resources and rejection of consumer desires has left public education borderline immoral. As well, if an educated citizenry is to be considered necessary for the operation of the republican government, then it is an inexcusable conflict of interest when elected officials are the ones in charge of providing that education. Furthermore, the argument of externalities and nonexcludability fails to buttress the case for socialist education. The only ethical, reasonable system for the provision of primary education is the fr

One of the best descriptions I've seen on how our problems in the health care market have been caused is here, in an article that is actually about Wal-Mart.

Sorry to respond to my own post, but if you want a much better explanation of the point I was trying to make, you should check out The Problem of Unemployment section in Rothbard's "Man, Economy, and State":

"But what of the able-bodied worker who cant find a job? This situation cannot obtain. In those cases, of course, where a worker insists on a certain type of job or a certain minimum wage rate, he may well remain unemployed. But he does so only of his own volition and on his own responsibility. Thus, suppose that perhaps half the labor force suddenly insisted that they would not work unless they received a job in New York City in the television industry. Obviously, unemployment would suddenly become enormous. This is only a large-scale example of something that is always going on. There may be a shift of industry away from one town or region and toward another. A worker may decide that he wants to remain in the old town and insists on looking for a job there. If he fails to get one, however, the fault lies with himself and not with the capitalist system. The same is true of a clerk who insists on working only in the TV industry, or of a radio employee who refuses to leave for television and insists on working only in radio. We are not condemning these workers here. We are simply saying that by their decisions they are themselves choosing not to be employed."

"The able-bodied in a developed economy can always find work, and work that will pay an over-subsistence wage. This is so because labor is scarcer than land, and enough capital has been invested to raise the marginal value product of laborers sufficiently to pay such a wage. But while this is true in the general labor market, it is not necessarily true for particular labor markets, for particular regions or occupations, as we have just seen."

"If a worker can withdraw from the labor market by insisting on a certain type of work or location of work, he can also withdraw by insisting on a certain minimum wage payment. Suppose a man insisted that he would not work at any job unless he is paid 500 gold ounces per year. If his best available DMVP [Discounted Marginal Value Product] is only 100 gold ounces per year, he will remain unemployed. Whenever a man insists on a wage higher than his DMVP, he will remain unemployed, i.e., unemployed at the wage that he insists upon. But then this unemployment is not a problem, but a voluntary choice on the part of the idle person."

There's a great book on the history and nature of money here. But personally, I think the humans have been trained in many respects, like the monkeys.

If we don't get AZT, we will get something else not simply produced for marketing.

If they had any value the market would have assigned them a price

Many people find themselves mystified as to why the Mises Institute puts books online for free that it is also trying to sell (...). Below is a detailed account of how we arrived at the policy that as many books as possible should be made available online and offline--and why we think it would be a good idea for all publishers to do the same. (...) The point is to expand the market and not assume a fixed number of consumers. Books online and offline reinforce the viability of each other, just as movies in theaters boost movies in rental, and free radio helps the market for CDs for purchase. It takes some thought and entrepreneurial judgment to understand why, but the history of technological development informs the case. As one commentator put it on the Mises blog: "Nor did ideas written down in scrolls or illuminated manuscripts undermine the teacher/guru. Nor did knowledge in mass-printed books undermine schools/colleges." (...)

You can usually find libertarian analysis on each specific kind of reason regulators develop for the need of regulation, but a simple answer to them all at once isn't available. Not that I agree with all they say on each and every subject, but that they do work deeply on all of them, they do. At the Mises Institute website alone you'll find tens of thousands of articles, or even full length books (downloadable for free), on all these subjects, including the ones you mentioned. They're worth reading, if for no other reason than to better know the many arguments available.

Quite possibly ... they got a lot of things RIGHT in their revision of the Constitution.

http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control =353

* Eliminated the "general welfare" open door
* Enforced free trade and opposed protectionism
* Prevented Congress from appopriating money for internal improvements intended to facilitate commerce (e.g. pork-barrel public works)
* Gave the President line-item Veto (only 130+ years earlier!)
* Appropriations required two thirds majority
* Eliminated cost-overruns for government contractors
* Eliminated omnibus spending bills - no hidden expenditures

Oh, and before the revisionist history trolls start knee-jerking about slavery, please read the article - in particular, the quote from Abraham Lincoln.

Read What Has Government Done to Our Money? and get back to me.

IMarv

I could respond on a point-by-point basis, but that would probably be a waste of both our times. Instead I'll simply refer you to this excerpt from Power & Market by Murray N. Rothbard, which addresses most of the issues you've raised.

I could respond on a point-by-point basis, but that would probably be a waste of both our times. Instead I'll simply refer you to this excerpt from Power & Market by Murray N. Rothbard, which addresses most of the issues you've raised.

I find it interesting that people talk about WoW gold, L$, and other 'fake' currencies as some kind of novelty. I think they are more significant than that.

Money itself is a commodity with a price. We always hear governments talking about 'free' and 'open' markets - but just try to introduce a private-label currency and see how far you get. If currency markets were truly free, consumers would decide which currency mattered most, and government would not limit their choices to an 'official' national one.

We keep hearing about government schemes to tax 'virtual' income. It's not so much that politicians are greedy (though they certainly are), more that they see virtual currency as a coming threat to government monopoly on the money market.

I recommend that everyone take the time to read http://www.mises.org/money/2s7.asp

A universal set of social rules would simply include the necessary provisions, such as self-defense, which permit such enforcement.

Just to follow up on this point, you can find a reasonably sound defense of the legitimacy of proportional punishment -- based on common-law principles -- in the journal article Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach by N. Stephan Kinsella.

to paraphrase winston churchill: democracy is the worst form of government devised, except for all of the other types of government

Not that I have read that many of them yet, but here is one of my favorite books on ethics and morality, free online version: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp

Recommendation: The committee suggests exploring whether or not the notion of copy is an appropriate foundation for copyright law, and whether a new foundation can be constructed for copyright, based on the goal set forth in the Constitution ("promote the progress of science and the useful arts") and a tactic by which it is achieved, namely, providing incentive to authors and publishers. In this framework, the question would not be whether a copy had been made, but whether a use of a work was consistent with the goal and tactic (i.e., did it contribute to the desired "progress" and was it destructive, when taken alone or aggregated with other similar copies, of an author's incentive?). This concept is similar to fair use but broader in scope, as it requires considering the range of factors by which to measure the impact of the activity on authors, publishers, and others.

Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas, leaving thousands of old movies, records and books languishing behind a legal barrier.

I appreciate your response, but I don't think it addressed any of these issues. Information has always been a commodity. Someone owns it and controls it for a while until its usefulness wanes, or until it is stolen, or otherwise revealed by some other means. However it is true, for the most part, that once freed, information is rarely able to be contained again. So it could be argued perhaps that information has value as long as it is able to be controlled, and that as soon as it gets beyond its owner to control, it is public and cannot (or is rarely) be contained again and thus becomes public.

I appreciate your response, but I don't think it addressed any of these issues. Information has always been a commodity. Someone owns it and controls it for a while until its usefulness wanes, or until it is stolen, or otherwise revealed by some other means. However it is true, for the most part, that once freed, information is rarely able to be contained again. So it could be argued perhaps that information has value as long as it is able to be controlled, and that as soon as it gets beyond its owner to control, it is public and cannot (or is rarely) be contained again and thus becomes public.

I appreciate your response, but I don't think it addressed any of these issues. Information has always been a commodity. Someone owns it and controls it for a while until its usefulness wanes, or until it is stolen, or otherwise revealed by some other means. However it is true, for the most part, that once freed, information is rarely able to be contained again. So it could be argued perhaps that information has value as long as it is able to be controlled, and that as soon as it gets beyond its owner to control, it is public and cannot (or is rarely) be contained again and thus becomes public.

What is this pain and suffering? First of all, a book is an inanimate object, and cannot feel pain. Secondly, aside from ripping the book in half, how would you inflict any suffering on it? This part of the rhetoric is empty.

On the person whose private property you're taking possession. If he doesn't obey your demands on how she "should" use her private property, you're entitled to demand from the government that it confiscate money from her and even that it removes her liberty, sending her to prison. It's a power in your hand to inflict pain and suffering to others.

You explaining what copyright is supposed to protect is not necessary. My original post was a rebuttal of the whole concept. You reexplaining it won't make my rebuttal go away. My position is quite simple actually: if something isn't limited, it isn't property of any kind. Using and old example: if I have an apple and you take it from me, you end with an apple and I end with none. On the other hand, if I have a book and you copy it from me, you end with the book and I retain mine. Intellectual goods are "infinite" by nature, because from one (copy) I can produce infinite (copies) without neither the original nor me losing anything. And anything that is infinite is by itself devoid of economical valuation. The only way an intellectual good can become economically valuable is if there's an artificial limitation on its ability to be copied. And the most effective limitation is the treat of strong punishment by a 3rd party, which in the end is always the government, the only entity that can officially use violence to achieve its goals, and the goals of whom it supports.

And frankly, you are wrong about me not losing money. By your argument, I could hire a secretary or office assistant and then refuse to pay him, and it's all right because they haven't lost any money. But they have - they've worked hard, and they were not given the compensation they earned, and any labour lawyer will tell you that it does constitute lost income. When dealing with piracy of intellectual property, the same model applies.

No. X contracts you to write a book. X is obliged to pay you. This is a contract after all, you're working for him. Then comes Y and copies the book. Y isn't obliged to pay you, because you have no contract with him. Same thing when you enter a place that was cleaned by Z. The place owner is the one who must pay Z, not you. Same thing with the secretary you contracted, you must pay her, not, let's say, the person to whom she sent a letter you told her to send, or the 3rd party who read the letter that was open in the addressee's desk.

Let's do some math.

Instead of dreaming highly hypothetical math that has no bearing on reality, you should seek information on what actually happened to publishers who posted themselves their books for free on the Net. Want an actual example? Here's a good one.

You're showing the same lack of understanding on the way intellectual content actually works in an free information exchange reality that RIAA shows. I congratulate you on your despising their methods, but the fact is that you, and probably your publisher, as well as RIAA, all of you still aren't taking the subject from the proper angle. When, and if, you do, you'll finally understand what's wrong with the whole concept.

Boy, there's a part of me that wishes you were right about this. I'd be so much better off financially if you were. Unfortunately, you're entirely wrong. This is the reality:

This is the reality because the legal framework is distorted and publishers work based on the absurd concept of copyright. Were this nonexistent and the market would realign itself to the new situation. In the new scenario, authoring as a service is as any service: you must prove to whomever would contract you that it's worth the investment. Ask any open-source

This is exactly the problem with the current socialist school system. We have no way to value language teachers versus math or any other kinds of teachers because we have destroyed the pricing system that would let us do so.

Only when we have for-profit schools free of government interference will we be able to correctly answer simple questions like:
How many math teachers do we need?
How much should they be paid?

Until then we face shortages (50 students per classroom) and many ridiculous arguments over how much is the right amount to pay a teacher (pay them all the same, pay them double, pay math teachers more, pay them based on GDP of their respective field...).

This basic argument against socialism was first put forward in 1920 (predicting the economic collapse of socialist countries), but is still largely unfamiliar to most people. Read it here: http://www.mises.org/econcalc.asp

Another good example of how we mess things up when we socialize things that could've been left up to the free market. Of course, NOT socializing law creation, law enforcement, and law adjudication is a radical idea to most people. But then again, so is NOT socializing education, sports, or health care.

Amen, Brother. Amen.

Read more Will Rogers here

The best of a handful of articles I've seen on the subject is here.

This the same Calder often quoted derogatorily on certain websites with anti environmentalist leanings?
several quote an article "In the Grip of a New Ice Age?" in the National Wildlife Federation's journal, International Wildlife attributed to a "Nigel Calder" in 70's
the line they like to quote is: "the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."
eg http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba337/ba337.html
http://www.mises.org/story/2119
http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosop hy/BG1143.cfm