Well sorry but I'll take the worlds most reputable university ranking systems such as QS/Times (UK based) and ARWU (Chinese) ahead of the opinion of your relative who works at Princeton:
I agree that (government run) public education at the lower levels in the US is awful but the top private educational institutions especially at college level are the best in the world by far. Take ARWU rankings. There are 54 US universities in the top 100, and only one from Sweden. Even taking into account the difference in population size that is a big gap. It's nothing to do with the brain drain or any such nonsense. It's to do with the fact that in the US these universities operate under highly competitive environment and market forces are playing their part and forcing them to improve while in many European countries that is not the caase.
Well I agree with a lot of what you said. We on the conservative side have our share of jerks trying to jump on the bandwagon of the moment, some of whom you mentioned, just like the left has theirs (Olbermann, Maher, and I would include Jon Stewart as well, as well as everybody on MSNBC which is actually more biased than Fox). As for those who have or aspire to political power, come on, Biden?, Hillary?, Sharpton? etc etc one populist windbag next to another.
Take a look at the republican primaries and see how the established GOP insiders are running scared state after state. Here in NV the republican hand picked candidate Sue Lowden is now behind in the polls to the previously almost unknown Tea Party endorsed Sharron Angle and the state GOP establishment is so pissed that some are threatening to support Reid (talk about political suicide) http://www.lvrj.com/news/angle-irks-some-gop-insiders-94565394.html There is a new crop op republicans coming through these primaries on the back the Tea Party support and I think some new leaders will emerge.
It's hard for a fledgling grassroots movement to completely shun somebody as high profile as Palin and the publicity that she brings, but actually she is not mentioned on any Tea Party websites as any kind of a leader, and many are trying to distance the movement from her: http://www.newpatriotjournal.com/Articles/Tea_Party_Patriots_Dispute_Claims_that_Sarah_Palin_is_the_Tea_Party_Leader . I don't dislike Palin as a person but she doesn't have the intellectual capacity to lead a girl scout troop, never mind the country.
Well the US is obviously more innovative than Europe by any measure (take computer technology, biotechonlogy, medicine, count Nobel prizes in any technical field). As to why, my intuitive feeling (no I don't have hard data) is that there is more incentive to innovate in a system where the material rewards are greater and you don't have to pay 60% of your income to the government as you do in many European countries. Also, the higher education system in the US is much better mostly because the top universities are private and subject to market competition while in many European countries higher education is fully government controlled (Germany for example, which I think is why it has gone down so dramatically in physics and other fields). On the other hand, the US system is worse at the lower end, and better at the high end, but it is the high end where innovation comes from. Just my opinion but I am looking forward to hearing any alternative theories why the US has had a huge lead in science and technological innovation over Europe since the war even though Europe as a whole has a larger population and a great tradition in science.
What are you talking about? Here is a poll you might find interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html. If you can;t be bothered to read it here is the first sentence as a summary: "Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public [...] according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."
I see you are falling for the vicious and baseless left wing media and Democrat politicians' attacks against the Tea Party precisely because they know that what it stands for hits at the heart of the liberal collectivist, statist mentality. Btw, the Contract From America 10 points were chosen by vote of abou 1/2 million Tea Party members and supporters and notice that none of them mentions race, immigration, violence or any other things that they are being smeared with.
Actually libertarians were against it and the the only two true conservative libertarian (then) house representatives Paul and Otter voted agains it. As a libertarian talking to (presumably) a liberal, I can also tell you who voted FOR the PATRIOT act:
Democratic senators: Biden, Boxer, Dodd, Kennedy, Leahy, Reid - in fact ALL Democratic senators except for one (Feingold)
124 Democratic house members including Pelosi
As for Obama, he renewed it this February without any changes
No, needs simply don't come into it. I "need" all kinds of stuff but I don't assume the right to force other people to provide it to me which is what European style welfare state amounts to.
There is no such thing as free healthcare! in France they pay for it as well as for other social services through taxes. They also have no innovation or entrepreneurship, low work ethic, historically very high unemployment even when artificially limiting the work week by law, constant strikes, all of which produces per capita GDP of $33K versus $46K in the USA. They also actually have much lower standard of living that would compare badly even with the poorest USA states, live in tiny (by US standards) overpriced apartments and paying $6 per gallon of gas. Let's not forget the taxes: 46% of the GDP v. 28% in the USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
Jefferson was a great man but I think to list him as one of the most influential political philosophers is the wrong category. Which original ideas did he contribute that were so influential? He was himself influenced by a long line of enlightenment thinkers but his own writings didn't really amount to much http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#Writings.
It seems that is also BS. According to an article in WSJ which magically became subscription only after I read it, Jefferson is all over the history curriculum, he was only removed from the list of the the most influential political philosophers which is fair enough since he wasn't one, but they they added him back in before the final draft was approved.
Somebody like you would not understand but for the benefit of other readers this is what the tea party stands for: http://www.thecontract.org/support/ Vote out anybody who doesn't support it.
For somebody who talks so much about bias you seem to have plenty of it.
What seems clear is that the new system seems to want to rewrite history
That's exactly what does not seem clear. Does mentioning Clinton's impeachment amount to rewriting history? Or perhaps mentioning the "conservative resurgence" during Reagan years. Or asking the students to evaluate the impact of global organizations on US sovereignty, or to evaluate the "constitutional" church and state separation - which is regrettably (speaking as an atheist) not in the constitution. Which of those amount to rewriting history?
And I really don't think that a nation who thinks that healthcare means death camps needs anymore right-wing bias do you?
Now, that's just crazy. The issue is not about "healthcare" (who doesn't want healthcare?), the issue is about who pays for it which is a perfectly legitimate discussion. I think you will find it was "death panels" not "death camps" and the issue is a legitimate one. In a single payer system the "payer" (the government) determines what it will pay for and how much. If for example there is an extremely expensive procedure that will only marginally if at all prolong the patients life it is routine in single payer countries for the government to not approve such procedures. In a system where everybody pays for their own care the decisions like that are up to the patient.
You are right. Whether they realize it or not, the "progressives" in the US tend more towards fascism than socialism i.e. they don't want to nationalize private property they simply want the state to control it.
I'd like someone to point me to the list of actual inaccuracies in there? I have read the first 10-15 most recent articles google turned up that seemed from the tile to be very critical of the new curriculum and hardly a single bit of information on what exactly is wrong with it. Newsweek has a list of 10 "silliest changes" http://www.newsweek.com/id/238322 and they don't seem particularly silly or factually inaccurate. If that's the worse there is then I don't understand what the fuss is about.
Are you referring to/. posters who are making knee-jerk hostile comments without having any idea what changes were actually made to the curriculum? Yes they are.
It depends on how you define the market. If the market in question is "advertising" or even "online advertising" (as opposed to "mobile advertising" as is the case here) then it is absolutely clear that google does not have anything like a monopoly. The narrower your definition of a market the more monopolies you can find. What's so special about having a dominant position in mobile advertising that every other form of advertising out there would not be considered to be in competition with you?
that presumes that you have a society absent of people that would impinge whatever notion of liberty you have (presumably a society that is culturally deeply anarchosocialist or anarchocapitalist)
That wouldn't work either because even in an imaginary society like that you would have honest disagreements between people and you will need an impartial arbiter.
I'd rather people either balance whatever structured and predictable coercion they're likely to get from the state against whatever they think they're going to get from society, or more ideally decide that some amount of coercion that's mostly predictable and generally for good reasons is an inevitable part of getting other things they value more than absence of coercion.
That doesn't answer anything and just leads you around in circles. What if you prefer more coercion and more "goodies" from the government (that's what you are really talking about when you say "society", right?) while I prefer less coercion and less goodies. How do you deal with the inconvenient people like me in achieving your preferred society? By coercion?
Maybe they'd come even closer to my view and consider the things people buy with money as privileges that are granted by society in return for presumably serving society through work, with the understanding that excessive amounts of privilege will be scaled back should others have more pressing needs. I'm not bothered much by taxes (even as I make well above the national average) because I think that by and large the taxes I pay go to good purposes. I see them as a duty, and think it'd be selfish to press for more luxury for me in the form of lower taxes.
Wow, so from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, huh? That worked out really well wherever it was tried. That if you consider famine, dictatorship, mass murder, slavery, and denial of the human nature and crushing of the human spirit to be a good thing.
The evidence I was asking for is to back up his claim that "Huge cartels (if not just one big monopoly) is exactly where the "free market" would end up without this sort of regulation." I think price fixing is a natural property of a free market in that it will inevitably happen and cannot be generally caught without, as in this case, somebody snitching. However, I don't think that it is nearly as big a problem as he suggested as cartels as inherently unstable and tend to break down quickly. Each of the companies involved is looking out for its own interest and for the best company in the cartel it is advantageous to break from the cartel and undercut the others.
Your rational thought is failing you. The reason you can't come up with any examples of natural monopolies is that there aren't any. It's a mostly a theoretical problem because it simply does not happen in practice.
What would _stop_ a cartel or monopoly from forming ?
Cartels are inherently unstable and rarely form at all. What is the advantage to the most efficient company in a particular market in joining a cartel with less efficient ones when it can beat them in the competition and take their market share? Even when a cartel does form (say to fix the price to a higher level) a strong incentive is always there for each of its members to undercut the others and take their market share.
Once a few companies have gotten together, or a single one has gotten large enough, how is a new competitor going to enter the market when the established ones can either buy it out, or just undercut it until it runs out of cash ?
If the monopoly is setting the price to high (say 30% profit margin) then it is presenting an incentive for every investor, every company in a similar industry which might already have infrastructure in place, and every foreign company in the same industry to enter into the market and set its margin to 20% and steal much it the monopoly's market share while still raking in a large profit. At some point pretty soon the monopoly will not be able to buy them all out. If the monopoly is setting the price very low in order to discourage competition then where is the problem? The free market is working through the possibility of competition if not actual competition.
And what evidence do you base that on? How would your big monopoly stop competitors from emerging? Care to provide any examples of where such huge monopolies did happen and survived for any length of time? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU
Well I think what we mean by "libertarian" is not very well defined and this is why it is commonly confused (at least I think that is the appropriate word) with anarchism. The difference is that what I call libertarian or classical liberal view of the government is as an umpire, protecting individual liberty by monopolizing the use of force in a way that is governed by objective laws (see Hayek, Rand, Friedman, Smith, Mises, Bastiat, etc etc) while the anarchist viewpoint is that the government should be removed altogether. Frankly, I wish that the anarchists would simply start calling themselves anarchists instead of libertarians because what you believe is not within the tradition of libertarian thought and was denounced by all the ladies and gentlemen I mentioned above, especially Ayn Rand http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html
Things start to get tricky, even from a libertarian/(min/an)archistic standpoint
Libertarian viewpoint which places liberty as the highest value is completely incompatible with the anarchistic viewpoint because liberty cannot exist in an anarchy, so those terms don't belong in the same sentence, never mind separated by a / as if they are two sides of the same coin.
Trouble is, in many housing markets, housing is constrained, either due to resource shortages (water, usually) or geography (too many mountains, too wide of a river, can't build any higher, etc.). In these markets, any quantity of housing will be consumed
Because people can't move?
Most urban areas discovered this the hard way in the early 20th century, which led to a ton of legislation meant to curb the worst of the abuses
Most of that legislation produced unintended bad effects such as the condition of the properties being generally worse while the rent price being higher in the rent controlled areas than in non-rent controlled areas.
Another, more apocryphal but potentially more illuminating example, would be if there was only one grocery store in a remote town and it required all shoppers to register with it as part of a "Buyer's Club" before shopping there. One of the conditions of the "Buyer's Club" contract is a clause that forbids the shopper from shopping at another grocery store for a fixed period (say, five years).
Apocryphal (i.e. spurious) is a good word for it. Can you find a single example where that has happened and if not why not? Because you cannot prosper in a free market by effectively declaring a war on your customers and generating so much ill will that any competitor entering the market will immediately take all your customers away. What you are really talking about is the same thing everybody talks about when they attack free market - the fear of monopoly. Yet, historically, almost all true monopolies that ever existed were created in one way or another by government regulation.
What do you mean by once a day? If I buy stock right now I have to wait until the same time 24 hrs later to sell it?
Explain to me just what a multi-billion company could do in under a second that would fundamentally change the value of their stock?
Not much, but the news of whatever it did or anything else that might affect it can spread in a second. Every time a negative piece of news comes out regarding some company or industry, all the people unfortunate enough to have bought the stock in the last 24 hrs have to sit on their hands while anybody who bought the stock over 24 hrs ago is able to sell it? It seems completely arbitrary
Equality by itself doesn't mean anything, if it did North Korea would be the ideal society: everyone is equally hungry. US poverty line these days is $22,000/year for a family of four, with only about 17% of the population living below that line. Compare that with the average income in those countries you mention and you will see that even the small percentage of people living in "poverty" in the USA are still having a better standard of living than the "middle class" in those countries. As for the very rich, what do you think they do with their billions? Keep them under their mattress? No, they invest it in new businesses.
As for the life expectancy, you make a big deal of the fact that the US ranks 49th but actually the difference between the no. 2 and no. 49 is only 4 years. I think that can be accounted for by the lifestyle more than anything else. It's not scarcity that causes Americans to live less long but the abundance of cheap food: they are too fat.
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Well sorry but I'll take the worlds most reputable university ranking systems such as QS/Times (UK based) and ARWU (Chinese) ahead of the opinion of your relative who works at Princeton:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education-QS_World_University_Rankings#Times_Higher_Education_-_QS_World_University_Rankings_.28Top_20.29
http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp
I agree that (government run) public education at the lower levels in the US is awful but the top private educational institutions especially at college level are the best in the world by far. Take ARWU rankings. There are 54 US universities in the top 100, and only one from Sweden. Even taking into account the difference in population size that is a big gap. It's nothing to do with the brain drain or any such nonsense. It's to do with the fact that in the US these universities operate under highly competitive environment and market forces are playing their part and forcing them to improve while in many European countries that is not the caase.
Well I agree with a lot of what you said. We on the conservative side have our share of jerks trying to jump on the bandwagon of the moment, some of whom you mentioned, just like the left has theirs (Olbermann, Maher, and I would include Jon Stewart as well, as well as everybody on MSNBC which is actually more biased than Fox). As for those who have or aspire to political power, come on, Biden?, Hillary?, Sharpton? etc etc one populist windbag next to another.
Take a look at the republican primaries and see how the established GOP insiders are running scared state after state. Here in NV the republican hand picked candidate Sue Lowden is now behind in the polls to the previously almost unknown Tea Party endorsed Sharron Angle and the state GOP establishment is so pissed that some are threatening to support Reid (talk about political suicide) http://www.lvrj.com/news/angle-irks-some-gop-insiders-94565394.html There is a new crop op republicans coming through these primaries on the back the Tea Party support and I think some new leaders will emerge.
It's hard for a fledgling grassroots movement to completely shun somebody as high profile as Palin and the publicity that she brings, but actually she is not mentioned on any Tea Party websites as any kind of a leader, and many are trying to distance the movement from her: http://www.newpatriotjournal.com/Articles/Tea_Party_Patriots_Dispute_Claims_that_Sarah_Palin_is_the_Tea_Party_Leader . I don't dislike Palin as a person but she doesn't have the intellectual capacity to lead a girl scout troop, never mind the country.
Well the US is obviously more innovative than Europe by any measure (take computer technology, biotechonlogy, medicine, count Nobel prizes in any technical field). As to why, my intuitive feeling (no I don't have hard data) is that there is more incentive to innovate in a system where the material rewards are greater and you don't have to pay 60% of your income to the government as you do in many European countries. Also, the higher education system in the US is much better mostly because the top universities are private and subject to market competition while in many European countries higher education is fully government controlled (Germany for example, which I think is why it has gone down so dramatically in physics and other fields). On the other hand, the US system is worse at the lower end, and better at the high end, but it is the high end where innovation comes from. Just my opinion but I am looking forward to hearing any alternative theories why the US has had a huge lead in science and technological innovation over Europe since the war even though Europe as a whole has a larger population and a great tradition in science.
What are you talking about? Here is a poll you might find interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html. If you can;t be bothered to read it here is the first sentence as a summary: "Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public [...] according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."
I see you are falling for the vicious and baseless left wing media and Democrat politicians' attacks against the Tea Party precisely because they know that what it stands for hits at the heart of the liberal collectivist, statist mentality. Btw, the Contract From America 10 points were chosen by vote of abou 1/2 million Tea Party members and supporters and notice that none of them mentions race, immigration, violence or any other things that they are being smeared with.
Actually libertarians were against it and the the only two true conservative libertarian (then) house representatives Paul and Otter voted agains it. As a libertarian talking to (presumably) a liberal, I can also tell you who voted FOR the PATRIOT act:
Democratic senators: Biden, Boxer, Dodd, Kennedy, Leahy, Reid - in fact ALL Democratic senators except for one (Feingold)
124 Democratic house members including Pelosi
As for Obama, he renewed it this February without any changes
No, needs simply don't come into it. I "need" all kinds of stuff but I don't assume the right to force other people to provide it to me which is what European style welfare state amounts to.
There is no such thing as free healthcare! in France they pay for it as well as for other social services through taxes. They also have no innovation or entrepreneurship, low work ethic, historically very high unemployment even when artificially limiting the work week by law, constant strikes, all of which produces per capita GDP of $33K versus $46K in the USA. They also actually have much lower standard of living that would compare badly even with the poorest USA states, live in tiny (by US standards) overpriced apartments and paying $6 per gallon of gas. Let's not forget the taxes: 46% of the GDP v. 28% in the USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
Better car? You mean this: http://www.enjoyfrance.com/images/stories/world/motoring/citroen-2cv.jpg
Jefferson was a great man but I think to list him as one of the most influential political philosophers is the wrong category. Which original ideas did he contribute that were so influential? He was himself influenced by a long line of enlightenment thinkers but his own writings didn't really amount to much http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#Writings.
It seems that is also BS. According to an article in WSJ which magically became subscription only after I read it, Jefferson is all over the history curriculum, he was only removed from the list of the the most influential political philosophers which is fair enough since he wasn't one, but they they added him back in before the final draft was approved.
Somebody like you would not understand but for the benefit of other readers this is what the tea party stands for: http://www.thecontract.org/support/ Vote out anybody who doesn't support it.
For somebody who talks so much about bias you seem to have plenty of it.
What seems clear is that the new system seems to want to rewrite history
That's exactly what does not seem clear. Does mentioning Clinton's impeachment amount to rewriting history? Or perhaps mentioning the "conservative resurgence" during Reagan years. Or asking the students to evaluate the impact of global organizations on US sovereignty, or to evaluate the "constitutional" church and state separation - which is regrettably (speaking as an atheist) not in the constitution. Which of those amount to rewriting history?
And I really don't think that a nation who thinks that healthcare means death camps needs anymore right-wing bias do you?
Now, that's just crazy. The issue is not about "healthcare" (who doesn't want healthcare?), the issue is about who pays for it which is a perfectly legitimate discussion. I think you will find it was "death panels" not "death camps" and the issue is a legitimate one. In a single payer system the "payer" (the government) determines what it will pay for and how much. If for example there is an extremely expensive procedure that will only marginally if at all prolong the patients life it is routine in single payer countries for the government to not approve such procedures. In a system where everybody pays for their own care the decisions like that are up to the patient.
You are right. Whether they realize it or not, the "progressives" in the US tend more towards fascism than socialism i.e. they don't want to nationalize private property they simply want the state to control it.
When it was co-opted by the left to mean socialism.
I'd like someone to point me to the list of actual inaccuracies in there? I have read the first 10-15 most recent articles google turned up that seemed from the tile to be very critical of the new curriculum and hardly a single bit of information on what exactly is wrong with it. Newsweek has a list of 10 "silliest changes" http://www.newsweek.com/id/238322 and they don't seem particularly silly or factually inaccurate. If that's the worse there is then I don't understand what the fuss is about.
Are you referring to /. posters who are making knee-jerk hostile comments without having any idea what changes were actually made to the curriculum? Yes they are.
You are confusing the cause and effect by stating that police not carrying guns results in more peaceful society. I think it's the other way around.
It depends on how you define the market. If the market in question is "advertising" or even "online advertising" (as opposed to "mobile advertising" as is the case here) then it is absolutely clear that google does not have anything like a monopoly. The narrower your definition of a market the more monopolies you can find. What's so special about having a dominant position in mobile advertising that every other form of advertising out there would not be considered to be in competition with you?
that presumes that you have a society absent of people that would impinge whatever notion of liberty you have (presumably a society that is culturally deeply anarchosocialist or anarchocapitalist)
That wouldn't work either because even in an imaginary society like that you would have honest disagreements between people and you will need an impartial arbiter.
I'd rather people either balance whatever structured and predictable coercion they're likely to get from the state against whatever they think they're going to get from society, or more ideally decide that some amount of coercion that's mostly predictable and generally for good reasons is an inevitable part of getting other things they value more than absence of coercion.
That doesn't answer anything and just leads you around in circles. What if you prefer more coercion and more "goodies" from the government (that's what you are really talking about when you say "society", right?) while I prefer less coercion and less goodies. How do you deal with the inconvenient people like me in achieving your preferred society? By coercion?
Maybe they'd come even closer to my view and consider the things people buy with money as privileges that are granted by society in return for presumably serving society through work, with the understanding that excessive amounts of privilege will be scaled back should others have more pressing needs. I'm not bothered much by taxes (even as I make well above the national average) because I think that by and large the taxes I pay go to good purposes. I see them as a duty, and think it'd be selfish to press for more luxury for me in the form of lower taxes.
Wow, so from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, huh? That worked out really well wherever it was tried. That if you consider famine, dictatorship, mass murder, slavery, and denial of the human nature and crushing of the human spirit to be a good thing.
The evidence I was asking for is to back up his claim that "Huge cartels (if not just one big monopoly) is exactly where the "free market" would end up without this sort of regulation." I think price fixing is a natural property of a free market in that it will inevitably happen and cannot be generally caught without, as in this case, somebody snitching. However, I don't think that it is nearly as big a problem as he suggested as cartels as inherently unstable and tend to break down quickly. Each of the companies involved is looking out for its own interest and for the best company in the cartel it is advantageous to break from the cartel and undercut the others.
Your rational thought is failing you. The reason you can't come up with any examples of natural monopolies is that there aren't any. It's a mostly a theoretical problem because it simply does not happen in practice.
What would _stop_ a cartel or monopoly from forming ?
Cartels are inherently unstable and rarely form at all. What is the advantage to the most efficient company in a particular market in joining a cartel with less efficient ones when it can beat them in the competition and take their market share? Even when a cartel does form (say to fix the price to a higher level) a strong incentive is always there for each of its members to undercut the others and take their market share.
Once a few companies have gotten together, or a single one has gotten large enough, how is a new competitor going to enter the market when the established ones can either buy it out, or just undercut it until it runs out of cash ?
If the monopoly is setting the price to high (say 30% profit margin) then it is presenting an incentive for every investor, every company in a similar industry which might already have infrastructure in place, and every foreign company in the same industry to enter into the market and set its margin to 20% and steal much it the monopoly's market share while still raking in a large profit. At some point pretty soon the monopoly will not be able to buy them all out. If the monopoly is setting the price very low in order to discourage competition then where is the problem? The free market is working through the possibility of competition if not actual competition.
And what evidence do you base that on? How would your big monopoly stop competitors from emerging? Care to provide any examples of where such huge monopolies did happen and survived for any length of time? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU
Well I think what we mean by "libertarian" is not very well defined and this is why it is commonly confused (at least I think that is the appropriate word) with anarchism. The difference is that what I call libertarian or classical liberal view of the government is as an umpire, protecting individual liberty by monopolizing the use of force in a way that is governed by objective laws (see Hayek, Rand, Friedman, Smith, Mises, Bastiat, etc etc) while the anarchist viewpoint is that the government should be removed altogether. Frankly, I wish that the anarchists would simply start calling themselves anarchists instead of libertarians because what you believe is not within the tradition of libertarian thought and was denounced by all the ladies and gentlemen I mentioned above, especially Ayn Rand http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html
Things start to get tricky, even from a libertarian/(min/an)archistic standpoint
Libertarian viewpoint which places liberty as the highest value is completely incompatible with the anarchistic viewpoint because liberty cannot exist in an anarchy, so those terms don't belong in the same sentence, never mind separated by a / as if they are two sides of the same coin.
Trouble is, in many housing markets, housing is constrained, either due to resource shortages (water, usually) or geography (too many mountains, too wide of a river, can't build any higher, etc.). In these markets, any quantity of housing will be consumed
Because people can't move?
Most urban areas discovered this the hard way in the early 20th century, which led to a ton of legislation meant to curb the worst of the abuses
Most of that legislation produced unintended bad effects such as the condition of the properties being generally worse while the rent price being higher in the rent controlled areas than in non-rent controlled areas.
Another, more apocryphal but potentially more illuminating example, would be if there was only one grocery store in a remote town and it required all shoppers to register with it as part of a "Buyer's Club" before shopping there. One of the conditions of the "Buyer's Club" contract is a clause that forbids the shopper from shopping at another grocery store for a fixed period (say, five years).
Apocryphal (i.e. spurious) is a good word for it. Can you find a single example where that has happened and if not why not? Because you cannot prosper in a free market by effectively declaring a war on your customers and generating so much ill will that any competitor entering the market will immediately take all your customers away. What you are really talking about is the same thing everybody talks about when they attack free market - the fear of monopoly. Yet, historically, almost all true monopolies that ever existed were created in one way or another by government regulation.
What do you mean by once a day? If I buy stock right now I have to wait until the same time 24 hrs later to sell it?
Explain to me just what a multi-billion company could do in under a second that would fundamentally change the value of their stock?
Not much, but the news of whatever it did or anything else that might affect it can spread in a second. Every time a negative piece of news comes out regarding some company or industry, all the people unfortunate enough to have bought the stock in the last 24 hrs have to sit on their hands while anybody who bought the stock over 24 hrs ago is able to sell it? It seems completely arbitrary
Equality by itself doesn't mean anything, if it did North Korea would be the ideal society: everyone is equally hungry. US poverty line these days is $22,000/year for a family of four, with only about 17% of the population living below that line. Compare that with the average income in those countries you mention and you will see that even the small percentage of people living in "poverty" in the USA are still having a better standard of living than the "middle class" in those countries. As for the very rich, what do you think they do with their billions? Keep them under their mattress? No, they invest it in new businesses.
As for the life expectancy, you make a big deal of the fact that the US ranks 49th but actually the difference between the no. 2 and no. 49 is only 4 years. I think that can be accounted for by the lifestyle more than anything else. It's not scarcity that causes Americans to live less long but the abundance of cheap food: they are too fat.