Thanks for entirely missing my point, were you purposely avoiding addressing it?
I cover your "point" at the end of my post. You may want to read that far before automatically clicking Reply To This...
there would be de facto monopoly, as there would be no way for a company to offset the capital expense with sales.
No way? Impossible? Based on what? Show it. What's your evidence? Where's your argument? You have a bald assertion... now back it up or discard it.
The existant monopoly (the first entrant) would underprice sales to the point where the second entrant would be forced out of business.
Now lower prices are bad for customers? It's all a matter of how much crap people are willing to accept at what price. If they demand better service, they will get it, if not from their current provider, from another one. If a desired service (higher bandwidth) is not even being offered, all the more reason for a competitor to move in and fill the gap.
This not about rights, it's about economics.
Individual rights - the freedom to trade voluntarily toward mutual benefit is capitalism. You can try to separate them all you want, for no purpose other than to make it more palatable to readers (and your own brain), but you're still violating rights nonetheless. Rights are always violated when anyone is forced do with their property, their person, their privacy, their values, things other than what they desire to do. The only force-backed entity in the US, to my knowledge, is the government, no?
You can spin it as rights all you want, but the simple fact is that individuals have long traded individual rights for collective good
Who did this? Where are the signatures? Are those people still alive? How can they speak for me or any other individual? How do you eradicate inalienable rights? Who determines what's in the "common good"? Who controls this common good? How are they not susceptible to corruption? You must answer each and every one of these questions if your position is to be taken seriously.
Go on and blather about anarchy
Hilarity ensues. Who's advocating anarchy? There must be some entity to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry. That is the government. Its only proper function is to support individual rights. Only when it extends itself into economic coercion does corruption occur.
given the existance of a current monopoly in that market
You're ignoring the demand for better service. If this demand is large enough, people will get what they want.
My other argument against it is that it is folly to believe that a functional system can exist where no individual gives up rights in exchange for benefit.
According to what argument? Show it. Where's your evidence? Where's your rationale? How do inalienable rights disappear to support your pet desire for a "collective good"?
I don't really care what your views on rights are
Indeed. Right to privacy be damned. Right to liberty, fuck it. Who cares. The collective good, as defined by those in charge according to the terms of their highest campaign financiers is all that matters. Now I challenge you to show me that that scenario is not inevitable (in fact, it's happening right now).
And, pray tell, who would have paid to lay out the cable, if there were no assurances that the owner of said cable could have a monopoly?
Who said the owner shouldn't have control of his pipes?
Guess what would tend to happen naturally if there were no regulation? A monopoly provider. With no regulatory oversight to ensure *some* decent level of service.
First, people aren't born with a right to internet access. Second, if a single company controls services, but their monopoly is not backed by government force (ie, NO other providers can come along and lay their own lines - like in the current system), what would maintain that monopoly? Either people would all be happy with their service, or some segment would be pissed off and want better service, creating a huge demand for better service. If that company doesn't comply, it is all the more likely that a competitor will move in to fill the void. Except in the current system, that's not possible, thanks to government restriction, as always.
Look, I understand that the free market has a lot of benefits, but
Let me stop you there: first, you either accept that people have individual rights, or you accept the violation those rights. By not accepting and encouraging the free market, you only encourage the violation of individual rights. Privacy, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, all freedoms innate in everyone. Accept them or reject them, but don't dress it up as some extortionist plot that prevents people from having things when those same people don't want to agree to the terms of the trade to get those things.
in a capital-intensive industry where profitability is hard to get without a monopoly, the best thing for end-customers is a well-regulated monopoly
And whose goal is "the best thing for end-customers"? Who decides what's best? What prevents them from being bought out? And most importantly, how do you justify the rights violations that come with preventing people from pursuing their own goals to their own ends?
how can you have free competition in cable?... Please, explain to me, how would you propose deregulating the cable industry in a manner that allows competitive access, does not involve government ownership of the infrastructure, and results in greater options for the end-consumer?
Parallel lines. Redundancy benefits the customer, who can switch to another provider if one goes down. Competition reduces costs and increases efficiency and desirable results, all benefiting the customer. Best of all, it does not violate any rights. I'd like to see your arguments against this, besides the paltry "that's ridiculous!", or "that's not convenient in the short-term!", or "that means more money will have to be invested by a company!"
Isn't redundancy a good thing? How exactly is that going to fix the situation, if the government simply tells a pipe-owner what they can do with their pipes. The government essentially owns the pipes, putting politicians to auction to the highest bidder. Whoever pumps the most into my campaign gets the monopoly.
The lack of da gubmint forcing the telcos to play nice effectively shuts-out any new competition before it starts..
How exactly can an existing telco prevent a competitor from expanding into their region? What force is preventing that competitor from existing in that region? Put a little thought into it and you'll figure it out.
its the same thing that stops auntie annie's cookie stop from butting into the walmart bakery's market share.
Actually, it's the customer's desire for lower prices, and Auntie Annie's desire to remain small and inefficient, that does that. If you believe the local shop should get more service, buy from there, and persuade your family and friends to do the same. What you should not do is demand that your government force Walmart to reduce their efficiency, reduce their profits, simply to make the local shop competitive. Doing so makes a mockery of the rights of everyone.
What's your point, exactly? Those customers who want more bandwidth could be offered higher bandwidth at a fee, and those fees could be minimized through competition. Does the new system offer these different levels of service, and if not why not? No competition.
You have only government restriction on the existence of competition to thank for the monopolies these jokers are able to maintain, despite customer demand for better services. In a more free system, customers would have threatened to leave for another provider by now. That would have forced providers to upgrade their systems to support the growing userbase. Not so here. There's no other choice.
"Accept our high prices and shitty service! What else are you gonna use? Dial up? DSL? HA!"
You've inadvertently brought to surface the contradictory nature of beliefs on this site. People like government control when it is convenient for them and will not impact their existing services that are the result of government control, and people hate government control when it inconveniences them. You'll see this in any forum. Here, people are for net neutrality, public science funding, etc, but are also for reducing the power of the FCC, space flight privatization, etc.
What you've got to realize is that any government control of economic markets like this is going to be detrimental in the long run, regardless of how convenient it is right now. What you also must realize is that if people merely demand better service, they will get it, completely without government control (provided that government restrictions don't exist to prevent those better services from coming about). Net neutrality should be inevitable, however it is not going to happen under the current system, whereby government restriction maintains draconian monopolies.
That's unfortunate, because the answer is that "we should not". The government does not have a right to property, although the Homestead Act gave a means by which the government could buy property from another government, and give it to people as they desired to make use of the property. The same should be done with offshore property. The government should not continue to make money off these properties, they are not landlords collecting rent, and should not be free to arbitrarily change these royalties - in short, the royalties should not exist.
In fact, over 59,000 words have gone into the deletion discussions alone. That's over one tenth of Atlas Shrugged! This doesn't include the several discussions that led to it being undeleted, likely bringing the wordcount to nearly double that.
Given that the GNAA is the most well-known deletion debated on Wikipedia, having been deleted, restored, and deleted again at least seven times, with huge discussions every time, I'm surprised that it's not there.
Picture a hockey game. There's rules and regulations that limit what players can and can't do. Those rules work or are changed until they do. The hockey game makes money. Now imagine a hockey game without rules regulations. How well does that work? It doesn't.
All you've said is that people have put thought into designing a game that sells tickets. Players aren't scoring all the time, the excitement is balanced, etc. How does that apply to the economy? Who is the United States trying to appeal to in order to "sell tickets"? Again, it's nice that you've described what makes a hockey game entertaining, but back in the world of context, this is not analogous to the economy.
Every human interaction requires a structure to be useful to it's participants.
The only things that are required for any human interaction are the rational minds of those involved in the interaction.
1. desirable to the majority of American citizens 2. desirable for the future of ALL Americans
Which future? Tomorrow? Next Thursday? A decade from now? Who decides which days of whose future get to be desirable while others' do not?
a) justified confidence in the stock market, which helps the market itself
Now you just have to show that all confidence leads to stability. The fact that traders have become addicted to government intervention in the economy does not imply that such intervention is justifiable, or that it leads to sustainability.
to the majority of people in the stock market... economy
Alright, now you just have to show that this is the only thing that matters.
Powerless people get ripped off by more powerful people all the freaking time
What power? If people have power over others, they are violating their rights and the government should step in to protect them. If you're simply talking about prices being too high - prices for what? Everything? If people put high price tags on their products, how would it sell, and how would those people survive? Do you really believe that competition leads to sustained higher prices, less efficiency, and lower quality of service?
Unhealthy societies degenerate into totalitarianism as the powerful bend laws to aid them, over the poor.
How does a government that is charged solely with protecting the rights of its citizens justify violating those rights? Again, you have to explain to me what you mean by "the powerful".
Hence the creation of our country's constitution, to keep the power balanced towards the interests of the less powerful.
See how you can argue anything if you just let context fly out the window? First you use "the powerful" to mean rich people (how would they have "power" if they could not influence a force-backed entity such as the government, I'm not sure). Now you use "the powerful" to mean actual power - an actual government imposing rights-violating laws on its citizens. Again, what is meant by "the powerful"?
Any other questions? How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
Yes in fact, the question that you left stuck at the end of your post, unanswered. I'll ask it again: How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
Market regulation happens because in many real situations, investment managers are able take high-risk positions to which they are never personally exposed, and that their customers aren't fully informed of.
If detrimental information is withheld by either party in an agreement, you do not believe that party should be held liable in court? Do you have examples of these real situations?
Also, if someone enters into an agreement with another without demanding openness with respect to risk and integrity, do you think the government should "rescue" them from their poor decision?
If you really want to see the unfettered free market in action, I suggest you check out the Colombian cocaine trade.
Do you really consider this an example of a "free market":
"Human rights organisations have long accused the Colombian security forces of backing the rightwing militias respon sible for murders, massacres and drug smuggling. Many military intelligence files are said to wrongly describe civil activists as subversives or terrorist sympathisers. The police are routinely accused by rights organisations, and the US state department, of taking part in or colluding in massacres."
Which individual right is being upheld by a government that commits massacres? Like McCain, you have co-opted "free market" for your own purposes.
An entirely unregulated free market is not desirable
This implies a desire. Whose desire? Desire implies values. Whose values? Your values? Shouldn't you just say, "I don't desire a free market." Or were you implying that might makes right?
The market, like any interaction between humans, requires structures such as regulations in order to actually be stable and useful.
Useful to whom and for what purpose?
And also, perhaps even more importantly, not just screw over the less powerful at will.
How do you claim that could happen in a society for which the only purpose served by the government is to protect and uphold the rights of its citizenry? How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for entirely missing my point, were you purposely avoiding addressing it?
I cover your "point" at the end of my post. You may want to read that far before automatically clicking Reply To This...
there would be de facto monopoly, as there would be no way for a company to offset the capital expense with sales.
No way? Impossible? Based on what? Show it. What's your evidence? Where's your argument? You have a bald assertion... now back it up or discard it.
The existant monopoly (the first entrant) would underprice sales to the point where the second entrant would be forced out of business.
Now lower prices are bad for customers? It's all a matter of how much crap people are willing to accept at what price. If they demand better service, they will get it, if not from their current provider, from another one. If a desired service (higher bandwidth) is not even being offered, all the more reason for a competitor to move in and fill the gap.
This not about rights, it's about economics.
Individual rights - the freedom to trade voluntarily toward mutual benefit is capitalism . You can try to separate them all you want, for no purpose other than to make it more palatable to readers (and your own brain), but you're still violating rights nonetheless. Rights are always violated when anyone is forced do with their property, their person, their privacy, their values, things other than what they desire to do. The only force-backed entity in the US, to my knowledge, is the government, no?
You can spin it as rights all you want, but the simple fact is that individuals have long traded individual rights for collective good
Who did this? Where are the signatures? Are those people still alive? How can they speak for me or any other individual? How do you eradicate inalienable rights? Who determines what's in the "common good"? Who controls this common good? How are they not susceptible to corruption? You must answer each and every one of these questions if your position is to be taken seriously.
Go on and blather about anarchy
Hilarity ensues. Who's advocating anarchy? There must be some entity to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry. That is the government. Its only proper function is to support individual rights. Only when it extends itself into economic coercion does corruption occur.
given the existance of a current monopoly in that market
You're ignoring the demand for better service. If this demand is large enough, people will get what they want.
My other argument against it is that it is folly to believe that a functional system can exist where no individual gives up rights in exchange for benefit.
According to what argument? Show it. Where's your evidence? Where's your rationale? How do inalienable rights disappear to support your pet desire for a "collective good"?
I don't really care what your views on rights are
Indeed. Right to privacy be damned. Right to liberty, fuck it. Who cares. The collective good, as defined by those in charge according to the terms of their highest campaign financiers is all that matters. Now I challenge you to show me that that scenario is not inevitable (in fact, it's happening right now).
And, pray tell, who would have paid to lay out the cable, if there were no assurances that the owner of said cable could have a monopoly?
Who said the owner shouldn't have control of his pipes?
Guess what would tend to happen naturally if there were no regulation? A monopoly provider. With no regulatory oversight to ensure *some* decent level of service.
First, people aren't born with a right to internet access. Second, if a single company controls services, but their monopoly is not backed by government force (ie, NO other providers can come along and lay their own lines - like in the current system), what would maintain that monopoly? Either people would all be happy with their service, or some segment would be pissed off and want better service, creating a huge demand for better service. If that company doesn't comply, it is all the more likely that a competitor will move in to fill the void. Except in the current system, that's not possible, thanks to government restriction, as always.
Look, I understand that the free market has a lot of benefits, but
Let me stop you there: first, you either accept that people have individual rights, or you accept the violation those rights. By not accepting and encouraging the free market, you only encourage the violation of individual rights. Privacy, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, all freedoms innate in everyone. Accept them or reject them, but don't dress it up as some extortionist plot that prevents people from having things when those same people don't want to agree to the terms of the trade to get those things.
in a capital-intensive industry where profitability is hard to get without a monopoly, the best thing for end-customers is a well-regulated monopoly
And whose goal is "the best thing for end-customers"? Who decides what's best? What prevents them from being bought out? And most importantly, how do you justify the rights violations that come with preventing people from pursuing their own goals to their own ends?
how can you have free competition in cable? ... Please, explain to me, how would you propose deregulating the cable industry in a manner that allows competitive access, does not involve government ownership of the infrastructure, and results in greater options for the end-consumer?
Parallel lines. Redundancy benefits the customer, who can switch to another provider if one goes down. Competition reduces costs and increases efficiency and desirable results, all benefiting the customer. Best of all, it does not violate any rights. I'd like to see your arguments against this, besides the paltry "that's ridiculous!", or "that's not convenient in the short-term!", or "that means more money will have to be invested by a company!"
Isn't redundancy a good thing? How exactly is that going to fix the situation, if the government simply tells a pipe-owner what they can do with their pipes. The government essentially owns the pipes, putting politicians to auction to the highest bidder. Whoever pumps the most into my campaign gets the monopoly.
The lack of da gubmint forcing the telcos to play nice effectively shuts-out any new competition before it starts ..
How exactly can an existing telco prevent a competitor from expanding into their region? What force is preventing that competitor from existing in that region? Put a little thought into it and you'll figure it out.
its the same thing that stops auntie annie's cookie stop from butting into the walmart bakery's market share.
Actually, it's the customer's desire for lower prices, and Auntie Annie's desire to remain small and inefficient, that does that. If you believe the local shop should get more service, buy from there, and persuade your family and friends to do the same. What you should not do is demand that your government force Walmart to reduce their efficiency, reduce their profits, simply to make the local shop competitive. Doing so makes a mockery of the rights of everyone.
What's your point, exactly? Those customers who want more bandwidth could be offered higher bandwidth at a fee, and those fees could be minimized through competition. Does the new system offer these different levels of service, and if not why not? No competition.
You have only government restriction on the existence of competition to thank for the monopolies these jokers are able to maintain, despite customer demand for better services. In a more free system, customers would have threatened to leave for another provider by now. That would have forced providers to upgrade their systems to support the growing userbase. Not so here. There's no other choice.
"Accept our high prices and shitty service! What else are you gonna use? Dial up? DSL? HA!"
This could have been written - exactly - by me!
You've inadvertently brought to surface the contradictory nature of beliefs on this site. People like government control when it is convenient for them and will not impact their existing services that are the result of government control, and people hate government control when it inconveniences them. You'll see this in any forum. Here, people are for net neutrality, public science funding, etc, but are also for reducing the power of the FCC, space flight privatization, etc.
What you've got to realize is that any government control of economic markets like this is going to be detrimental in the long run, regardless of how convenient it is right now. What you also must realize is that if people merely demand better service, they will get it, completely without government control (provided that government restrictions don't exist to prevent those better services from coming about). Net neutrality should be inevitable, however it is not going to happen under the current system, whereby government restriction maintains draconian monopolies.
Isn't this whole thing sad? The Scopes Monkey trial was over 80 years ago, and we're still dealing with this crap today.
This is not a question as to whether we should
That's unfortunate, because the answer is that "we should not". The government does not have a right to property, although the Homestead Act gave a means by which the government could buy property from another government, and give it to people as they desired to make use of the property. The same should be done with offshore property. The government should not continue to make money off these properties, they are not landlords collecting rent, and should not be free to arbitrarily change these royalties - in short, the royalties should not exist.
I'm proud to say that I didn't need or want any of that crap.
I'm proud to say that I'm too young to get that joke.
The Minority report and BigBrother scenarios are only going to be the tip of iceberg in 30+ years...
Careful, with comments like that, you're liable to wake up on an iceberg, with a GPS tracking device implanted in your skull.
Does this sound idiotic to anyone else? Of course it's going to work for people who are told how to act in order to get the device to flag them.
Now, if only we could be confident about exactly where our taxes are going...
energy work
Is that "kilograms meter squared per second squared" energy? Or what units do you use for energy?
"Jill Smith"? Are we in the 1940s? Let me fix that for you:
"6) Madison Cheyenne will like me!"
In fact, over 59,000 words have gone into the deletion discussions alone. That's over one tenth of Atlas Shrugged! This doesn't include the several discussions that led to it being undeleted, likely bringing the wordcount to nearly double that.
Given that the GNAA is the most well-known deletion debated on Wikipedia, having been deleted, restored, and deleted again at least seven times, with huge discussions every time, I'm surprised that it's not there.
Now make sure to keep reloading their photo gallery pages over and over again.
Picture a hockey game. There's rules and regulations that limit what players can and can't do. Those rules work or are changed until they do. The hockey game makes money. Now imagine a hockey game without rules regulations. How well does that work? It doesn't.
All you've said is that people have put thought into designing a game that sells tickets. Players aren't scoring all the time, the excitement is balanced, etc. How does that apply to the economy? Who is the United States trying to appeal to in order to "sell tickets"? Again, it's nice that you've described what makes a hockey game entertaining, but back in the world of context, this is not analogous to the economy.
Every human interaction requires a structure to be useful to it's participants.
The only things that are required for any human interaction are the rational minds of those involved in the interaction.
1. desirable to the majority of American citizens 2. desirable for the future of ALL Americans
Which future? Tomorrow? Next Thursday? A decade from now? Who decides which days of whose future get to be desirable while others' do not?
a) justified confidence in the stock market, which helps the market itself
Now you just have to show that all confidence leads to stability. The fact that traders have become addicted to government intervention in the economy does not imply that such intervention is justifiable, or that it leads to sustainability.
to the majority of people in the stock market... economy
Alright, now you just have to show that this is the only thing that matters.
Powerless people get ripped off by more powerful people all the freaking time
What power? If people have power over others, they are violating their rights and the government should step in to protect them. If you're simply talking about prices being too high - prices for what? Everything? If people put high price tags on their products, how would it sell, and how would those people survive? Do you really believe that competition leads to sustained higher prices, less efficiency, and lower quality of service?
Unhealthy societies degenerate into totalitarianism as the powerful bend laws to aid them, over the poor.
How does a government that is charged solely with protecting the rights of its citizens justify violating those rights? Again, you have to explain to me what you mean by "the powerful".
Hence the creation of our country's constitution, to keep the power balanced towards the interests of the less powerful.
See how you can argue anything if you just let context fly out the window? First you use "the powerful" to mean rich people (how would they have "power" if they could not influence a force-backed entity such as the government, I'm not sure). Now you use "the powerful" to mean actual power - an actual government imposing rights-violating laws on its citizens. Again, what is meant by "the powerful"?
Any other questions? How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
Yes in fact, the question that you left stuck at the end of your post, unanswered. I'll ask it again: How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
billions of dollars vanish out of the American economy
How so? You may want to read up on bankruptcy.
Market regulation happens because in many real situations, investment managers are able take high-risk positions to which they are never personally exposed, and that their customers aren't fully informed of.
If detrimental information is withheld by either party in an agreement, you do not believe that party should be held liable in court? Do you have examples of these real situations?
Also, if someone enters into an agreement with another without demanding openness with respect to risk and integrity, do you think the government should "rescue" them from their poor decision?
If you really want to see the unfettered free market in action, I suggest you check out the Colombian cocaine trade.
Do you really consider this an example of a "free market":
"Human rights organisations have long accused the Colombian security forces of backing the rightwing militias respon sible for murders, massacres and drug smuggling. Many military intelligence files are said to wrongly describe civil activists as subversives or terrorist sympathisers. The police are routinely accused by rights organisations, and the US state department, of taking part in or colluding in massacres."
Which individual right is being upheld by a government that commits massacres? Like McCain, you have co-opted "free market" for your own purposes.
"Oh! Oh! What is that?! What is that?!!? A new planet?!!
Nope. Cheetoh."
An entirely unregulated free market is not desirable
This implies a desire. Whose desire? Desire implies values. Whose values? Your values? Shouldn't you just say, "I don't desire a free market." Or were you implying that might makes right?
The market, like any interaction between humans, requires structures such as regulations in order to actually be stable and useful.
Useful to whom and for what purpose?
And also, perhaps even more importantly, not just screw over the less powerful at will.
How do you claim that could happen in a society for which the only purpose served by the government is to protect and uphold the rights of its citizenry? How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?