It took literally -decades- for courts to even establish that yes, smoking is directly related to lung-cancer, and yes, if a person has been smoking for decades and develop lung-cancer, it is likely that smoking is the cause.
True, but when the general population has been convinced a theory is correct, it's likely the courts will be convinced as well. It just takes a while for the scientists to convince the laymen. Plus, for the courts, it's not enough to say that something is 'probably true'. They often need to be convinced that it's true beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing when talking about matters of justice.
There's also the sligth problem of jurisdiction. I somehow don't think it'll be practical for farmers in Brazil to sue 39522 companies in 179 jurisdictions for their share of the blame for this years drougth.
Yes, it's practical: Just allow the farmers to voluntarily join a class-action lawsuit.
you may well be able to prove that the weather is on -average- drier in some region due to global warming, but proving that this spesific drougth is caused by that is another matter alltogether
Do we need to prove that a specific drought was caused by global warming in order to get some sort of justice? Suppose that five people murder five innocent victims. You can prove that each of the five criminals murdered one of the victims, but you don't know which criminal murdered which victim. Does that mean they all get to walk? I hope not. If so, then perhaps we should change the judicial system, rather than trying to work outside of it.
An 11.1% fall against the Euro means you have 11.1% less purchasing power when buying goods imported from Europe.
Huh? Doesn't it mean dollar holders lose, in general, 11.1% of their purchasing power for any good that could be sold on the global market?
For example, imagine a world in which you could buy one gold ounce for 1000 dollars, or one gold ounce for 1000 euros. In that case, the exchange rate would probably be 1:1. If the exchange rate were to ever go to 2:1, everyone would instantly have an arbitrage opportunity: Sell 1 gold ounce for 1000 euros, exchange those euros for 2000 dollars, and buy 2 gold ounces, for a profit of 1 gold ounce. But market action like that would quickly drive the exchange ratio back to 1:1.
So, if the exchange ratio were to ever go to 2:1, we could reason that either 1) the new exchange ratio will be short lived or 2) we will see a general price increase of 100%, in terms of dollars, on goods that could be (but will not necessarily be) exchanged on the global market. You seem to be treating the exchange rate as though it is unrelated to domestic prices, but perhaps I don't understand your position.
...so he thought he could trust an American company to protect his privacy (and his liberty, in this case).
An American company that violates Chinese laws will be shut down by the Chinese government. If he thought that the company would soon be banned from China (because it would protect his information), why would he bother setting up an account? Even if he thought that, I'm guessing the American company never promised to violate Chinese law. So, the company broke a promise it never made. How can you possibly find fault with the American company? I don't get it.
Jesus loves profits, hates anyone who thinks profits should take a distant second place to human rights.
No, the company's choice is to continue doing business in a country or not. The Chinese government decides if human rights will be violated or not.
Why do you think that refusing to do business with China will restore human rights? Trade helps both parties; lack of trade hurts both parties. Your idea of "helping" the Chinese people actually hurts them. You look down on a company who really does help the Chinese, just because they refused to make a sacrifice for a man who challenged the government. The fight was between that man and the government. No blame should fall upon the company.
No one *has* to do business with China. Choosing profit over human rights is forced on no one.
But Yahoo didn't choose to violate someone else's rights; the Chinese government did. Yahoo may have known what the Chinese government would do, but that doesn't make Yahoo responsible for the government's actions. If a woman knows that a rapist is hanging out in a dark alley, but she walks into the dark alley anyway, is she responsible for the rape that follows?
By the way, Yahoo is not only making profits; it is also providing a service to Chinese consumers. If Yahoo withdraws, then the Chinese consumers will lose as well.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, or how it is relevant...
I'm trying to argue that no one owes you anything, so it doesn't matter if it's "reasonable" or not to refuse to use their good or service. You respond by reiterating that it's not always "reasonable" to refuse someone's good or service, which makes me feel like we're just going in circles. So, I'll give up on this particular point.
There is no value in (to use a relevant example) two lines of fibre optic cable lying next to each other transferring the same bits over them when one could do the same job.
If the second line is transferring the same bits as the first line, why would anyone build the second one? A second line would only be built if it was transferring bits the first line was not.
It's true that the first line is the only line necessary to get the job done if the job is defined as "getting bits from point A to point B", but what if the owner of the first line doesn't want certain resources on his network used for a certain purpose? In that case, a second line is required. You can call that a "bad attitude", but you only say that because you don't like the way the resource is being used.
For example, some slashdotters are saying that it's okay to filter packets by kind, but not by source. But that's just the opinion of some slashdotters on how things should be done, and other users will differ. If you, as a customer, tend to use certain sources, it benefits you if traffic to and from those sources are favored. The owners of the network will try to guess at what their users would prefer more (as indicated by the amount the users are willing to pay, not by what the users say they want).
It's similar to coach and first class seating on an airplane. If you define getting the job done as "fitting as many people as you can on a plane", then first class is wasteful. But, since some people demand a certain amount of comfort and amenities on their flight, we have first class, and another plane is required for more passengers. No waste is taking place, it's just different strokes for different folks.
This theory works up until the point where avoiding that company's products is a reasonable thing to do. In many cases, that isn't true.
I don't believe there is some threshold of "reasonableness" in which other men become your slaves. For example, I can't say, "I was born without any arms and legs, making it unreasonable for me to take care of myself. Therefore, it is moral for me to ask society to force you, as a non-handicapped human being, to support me." No man owes you anything. If a man does offer you a good or service, for any price, be grateful for it. The fact that you find it unreasonable to refuse his offer shows how grateful you should be to him.
When that CEO and the rest of his regular golfing foursome control 99% - 100% of the avenues you have to access a particular good or service, then you probably should start caring about "so-called freedom".
Why? The CEO owes me nothing. He's going to run his company in order to maximize profit; in other words, to get customers to pay him as much as possible. If he is able to make more profit by providing an inferior service, then that must be because the customers are willing to pay more for an inferior service, and therefore, have only themselves to blame. On the other hand, if the majority of customers are happy with his service, but you are not, then that is your problem.
Needlessly duplicating that sort of infrastructure is a grossly wasteful and inefficient exercise.
If I build my own house, instead of moving into someone else's, is that needless duplication? No, because I value control, and I can control what I build myself. The only way for two people to have full control over a single good is to duplicate that good. You see this as wasteful because you don't like the way one of those individuals chooses to control his good. But why is your opinion of how the good should be controlled more important than his?
Also, don't forget that if company A controls a good in way that his customer B does not like, and B decides to duplicate that good, A will be pressured to give into B's demands. But if the government prevents B from duplicating that good (because it would be "wasteful"), then A has nothing to fear, and very little reason to give into B's demands.
If what you're saying is correct, why are we always up in arms when oppressive governments censor internet access?
Because an oppressive government uses stolen money (i.e. taxes) to fund its operations, and it prevents competition through physical violence or violent threats. In contrast, a company must acquire its money by providing goods and services, and a company can not use violence or violent threats to stop competition. A company can only oppress you to the extent that you allow yourself to be oppressed.
Another poster mentioned that it's dangerous to allow a random CEO to price a provider out of the market. Yes, a CEO exercising his right to control his company's property on behalf of the shareholders is dangerous to your "freedom" to dictate to that company how they will use their property. However, I don't believe in your so-called freedom. Build your own damn network.
And no, I don't think the government has a right to control the internet because it was partially built with tax dollars. If the government has funded the internet infrastructure in the past, then the solution is for that money to be repaid to the government, and for the government, in turn, to return the money to the taxpayers. The solution is not to treat the internet as though it is a "public resource", because that is both immoral and inefficient.
Is it possible you just weren't listening to the right people?
Oh, I wasn't taking their advice. I've actually been making contratrian bets in the stock market, and I've been doing pretty good. I just don't think we should start revising history by saying that mainstream economists have been warning us for years. They were wrong (as usual) when they predicted all we would see is a general slow-down, and I, for one, will not forget that.
I've been seeing dire warnings about a real estate bust for the last five years at least.
From what I remember, most mainstream financial articles were predicting the market would start slowing down or cooling off, but that's about it. The argument was that houses are different from stocks. Oh, sure, housing prices might go down in the hottest markets, but historically, national housing prices have never fallen. Someone from the Fed was quoted as saying that housing is a local, local, local phenomenon. A recession? Not to worry, that's extremely unlikely.
But now, the mainstream opinion has changed. They'll say it's because the data has changed. But, that's the point of making a prediction, isn't it? To predict when and how the data will change?
I'm sorry, I don't see much difference between your gold and dollar scenario. When you receive income, there are three things you can do with that income: Spend it on consumption, spend it on investment, or hold it. Think of it like an election with only two candidates: Consumption and Investment. If you don't vote for either candidate, that just means the election will be decided by everyone else's votes. Choosing not to vote doesn't hurt anyone.
Let's say that you want to buy a stock that is priced in euros. You have been holding on to some form of money for one month, but now you are going to convert that form of money into euros and buy that stock. During that one month, however, holding that money was not "useless", because it provided you with something very valuable: Protection against uncertainty. But, after one month, you decided to "vote" for investment.
Notice that it doesn't matter if the form of money in the above example is gold or dollars. That's the point I'm trying to make. The consumption-investment ratio and the demand for money are not related. If people increase their demand for money (because they want to 'hoard' it), that will lower prices across the board, since an increased demand for money means people are willing to trade more goods for a single dollar. But the mere fact that people demand more money tells us nothing about how the money that is not held will be spent. Society could easily choose to keep the same consumption-investment ratio. So, "hoarding" money, whether that money is gold or dollars, is never a problem.
What do you think will happen to the "free market" when Russia & China move into the power vaccuum left by a U.S. retreat? Markets will close, resources will get diverted, the dollar will drop, etc etc etc.
Conflicts are often created when two parties try to reach for power. Perhaps by "withdrawing" from the world stage, we might stop a lot of international conflicts before they start. We have to stop focusing on the so-called "rights" of nations and communities, and start focusing on the individuals, whose rights and property are trampled on in these global conflicts. If you want to give private charity, or provide private security for individuals in other countries, then I'm all for it. But, let's get out of the nation-building business. It only leads to destruction of property and life, which is never good for any market.
And before anyone mentions Blackwater, let me add that any private security firm should be bound by standard laws...a private contractor who kills an innocent civilian should be treated the same way we would treat a police officer who kills an innocent person over here.
Isolationism is not possible in the global economy.
How is it "isolationist" to freely trade with every other nation in the world? We might not be engaging the world with bullets and bombs, but that doesn't mean we've isolated ourselves from it.
It would be hard to argue that we'd be better off if we found a way to hoard [oxygen] and make people pay for it.
But, you're ignoring the fact that human beings did not create or produce oxygen; we just found oxygen all around us. Books, movies, etc. are completely different, because people created those works.
Morality is concerned with human action, not just the current state of things. So, yes, creative works became plentiful after they were created. But that tells us nothing about whether or not it is moral to copy those works.
A similar argument would be, "Terrorist attacks and earthquakes are similar, because in both cases, a lot of people die. But we don't punish anyone for an earthquake, so why should we punish anyone for a terrorist attack?" The argument notes the final state of things (i.e. people died), but fails to ask the relevant moral question (i.e. How did people die?). In the same way, you note the final state of things (i.e. a certain type of good is plentiful), but fail to ask the relevant moral question (Why is that type of good plentiful?). And so, you draw no moral distinction between breathing oxygen and copying creative works.
Once you put up a blog or small store, and it becomes popular, and you suddenly get a bill from a large provider who's not even your provider, saying you either pay, or they'll block all their customers from visiting you, you might get it.
Get what? That someone I'm not directly paying doesn't owe me anything? Sounds fair to me. Get as much as you can for the service you provide, that's what I say. It's just a question of who needs who more. The stronger one will ask the weaker one to pay. Thus, the stronger one will increase his profits, and therefore attract more competition (provided there are no governmental barriers), and all will be right with the world.
But that means curing people. There's more money to be made in treating symptoms.
If so, that means that consumers are willing to pay more to treat symptoms than they are for a cure. In that case, consumers have only themselves to blame.
Alright, I will respond to your 911 service message.
So let's say the fixed costs for providing the 911 service is $1000 (costs for infrastructure, monitoring, etc). Let's say that the marginal cost for providing the 911 service to a given subscriber is $10.
"The" 911 service? On the free market, there can be competing emergency numbers. For example, take the following paragraph from For a New Liberty:
"In the first place, there is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire, that the government must supply "police protection," as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all. But in actual fact there is no absolute commodity called "police protection" any more than there is an absolute single commodity called "food" or "shelter." It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth. In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute 'protection.'"
Couldn't the same be said about "911 service"? How many 911 operators will there be to take your call? What sort of equipment will they be using? How friendly and trained will the 911 operators be? If there is a queue for anything at all, can I pay more to get to the front of the queue?
We want to supply all 100 people with the service, so to do that, we have to charge a max of $11 for the service.
I don't agree with your assumptions, so it follows that I won't agree with your conclusion, either. It's like saying, "Well, the poorest person will only pay $1.50 for a McDonald's cheeseburger, and we have to provide a cheesebruger to everyone in the area, so that means we'll lose $1000 every day..." You assume that there is only one good that can be provided in one way, and your entire scenario follows from that fallacy. I won't respond with hard numbers, because the problem is not your math.
"Free supply not only subsidizes the users at the expense of nonusing taxpayers; it also misallocates resources by failing to supply the service where it is most needed. The same is true, to a lesser extent, wherever the price is under the free-market price. On the free market, consumers can dictate the pricing and thereby assure the best allocation of productive resources to supply their wants. In a government enterprise, this cannot be done. Let us take again the case of the free service. Since there is no pricing, and therefore no exclusion of submarginal uses, there is no way that the government, even if it wanted to, could allocate its services to their most important uses and to the most eager buyers. All buyers, all uses, are artificially kept on the same plane. As a result, the most important uses will be slighted. The government is faced with insuperable allocation problems, which it cannot solve even to its own satisfaction. Thus, the government will be confronted with the problem: Should we build a road in place A or place B? There is no rational way whatever by which it can make this decision. It cannot aid the private consumers of the road in the best way. It can decide only according to the whim of the ruling government official, i.e., only if the government officials do the consuming, and not the public. If the government wishes to do what is best for the public, it is faced with an impossible task."
Slashdot Mirror
It took literally -decades- for courts to even establish that yes, smoking is directly related to lung-cancer, and yes, if a person has been smoking for decades and develop lung-cancer, it is likely that smoking is the cause.
True, but when the general population has been convinced a theory is correct, it's likely the courts will be convinced as well. It just takes a while for the scientists to convince the laymen. Plus, for the courts, it's not enough to say that something is 'probably true'. They often need to be convinced that it's true beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing when talking about matters of justice.
There's also the sligth problem of jurisdiction. I somehow don't think it'll be practical for farmers in Brazil to sue 39522 companies in 179 jurisdictions for their share of the blame for this years drougth.
Yes, it's practical: Just allow the farmers to voluntarily join a class-action lawsuit.
you may well be able to prove that the weather is on -average- drier in some region due to global warming, but proving that this spesific drougth is caused by that is another matter alltogether
Do we need to prove that a specific drought was caused by global warming in order to get some sort of justice? Suppose that five people murder five innocent victims. You can prove that each of the five criminals murdered one of the victims, but you don't know which criminal murdered which victim. Does that mean they all get to walk? I hope not. If so, then perhaps we should change the judicial system, rather than trying to work outside of it.
An 11.1% fall against the Euro means you have 11.1% less purchasing power when buying goods imported from Europe.
Huh? Doesn't it mean dollar holders lose, in general, 11.1% of their purchasing power for any good that could be sold on the global market?
For example, imagine a world in which you could buy one gold ounce for 1000 dollars, or one gold ounce for 1000 euros. In that case, the exchange rate would probably be 1:1. If the exchange rate were to ever go to 2:1, everyone would instantly have an arbitrage opportunity: Sell 1 gold ounce for 1000 euros, exchange those euros for 2000 dollars, and buy 2 gold ounces, for a profit of 1 gold ounce. But market action like that would quickly drive the exchange ratio back to 1:1.
So, if the exchange ratio were to ever go to 2:1, we could reason that either 1) the new exchange ratio will be short lived or 2) we will see a general price increase of 100%, in terms of dollars, on goods that could be (but will not necessarily be) exchanged on the global market. You seem to be treating the exchange rate as though it is unrelated to domestic prices, but perhaps I don't understand your position.
...so he thought he could trust an American company to protect his privacy (and his liberty, in this case).
An American company that violates Chinese laws will be shut down by the Chinese government. If he thought that the company would soon be banned from China (because it would protect his information), why would he bother setting up an account? Even if he thought that, I'm guessing the American company never promised to violate Chinese law. So, the company broke a promise it never made. How can you possibly find fault with the American company? I don't get it.
Jesus loves profits, hates anyone who thinks profits should take a distant second place to human rights.
No, the company's choice is to continue doing business in a country or not. The Chinese government decides if human rights will be violated or not.
Why do you think that refusing to do business with China will restore human rights? Trade helps both parties; lack of trade hurts both parties. Your idea of "helping" the Chinese people actually hurts them. You look down on a company who really does help the Chinese, just because they refused to make a sacrifice for a man who challenged the government. The fight was between that man and the government. No blame should fall upon the company.
No one *has* to do business with China. Choosing profit over human rights is forced on no one.
But Yahoo didn't choose to violate someone else's rights; the Chinese government did. Yahoo may have known what the Chinese government would do, but that doesn't make Yahoo responsible for the government's actions. If a woman knows that a rapist is hanging out in a dark alley, but she walks into the dark alley anyway, is she responsible for the rape that follows?
By the way, Yahoo is not only making profits; it is also providing a service to Chinese consumers. If Yahoo withdraws, then the Chinese consumers will lose as well.
Effectively illegal in a number of places where government sponsored monopolies are the only option.
Yes, which is why we must put an end to government intervention. We have to move to a free market.
furthermore many of these networks were paid for by taxes to various extents making them effectively partially the property of the government.
I already answered this in the last paragraph of my post.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, or how it is relevant...
I'm trying to argue that no one owes you anything, so it doesn't matter if it's "reasonable" or not to refuse to use their good or service. You respond by reiterating that it's not always "reasonable" to refuse someone's good or service, which makes me feel like we're just going in circles. So, I'll give up on this particular point.
There is no value in (to use a relevant example) two lines of fibre optic cable lying next to each other transferring the same bits over them when one could do the same job.
If the second line is transferring the same bits as the first line, why would anyone build the second one? A second line would only be built if it was transferring bits the first line was not.
It's true that the first line is the only line necessary to get the job done if the job is defined as "getting bits from point A to point B", but what if the owner of the first line doesn't want certain resources on his network used for a certain purpose? In that case, a second line is required. You can call that a "bad attitude", but you only say that because you don't like the way the resource is being used.
For example, some slashdotters are saying that it's okay to filter packets by kind, but not by source. But that's just the opinion of some slashdotters on how things should be done, and other users will differ. If you, as a customer, tend to use certain sources, it benefits you if traffic to and from those sources are favored. The owners of the network will try to guess at what their users would prefer more (as indicated by the amount the users are willing to pay, not by what the users say they want).
It's similar to coach and first class seating on an airplane. If you define getting the job done as "fitting as many people as you can on a plane", then first class is wasteful. But, since some people demand a certain amount of comfort and amenities on their flight, we have first class, and another plane is required for more passengers. No waste is taking place, it's just different strokes for different folks.
This theory works up until the point where avoiding that company's products is a reasonable thing to do. In many cases, that isn't true.
I don't believe there is some threshold of "reasonableness" in which other men become your slaves. For example, I can't say, "I was born without any arms and legs, making it unreasonable for me to take care of myself. Therefore, it is moral for me to ask society to force you, as a non-handicapped human being, to support me." No man owes you anything. If a man does offer you a good or service, for any price, be grateful for it. The fact that you find it unreasonable to refuse his offer shows how grateful you should be to him.
When that CEO and the rest of his regular golfing foursome control 99% - 100% of the avenues you have to access a particular good or service, then you probably should start caring about "so-called freedom".
Why? The CEO owes me nothing. He's going to run his company in order to maximize profit; in other words, to get customers to pay him as much as possible. If he is able to make more profit by providing an inferior service, then that must be because the customers are willing to pay more for an inferior service, and therefore, have only themselves to blame. On the other hand, if the majority of customers are happy with his service, but you are not, then that is your problem.
Needlessly duplicating that sort of infrastructure is a grossly wasteful and inefficient exercise.
If I build my own house, instead of moving into someone else's, is that needless duplication? No, because I value control, and I can control what I build myself. The only way for two people to have full control over a single good is to duplicate that good. You see this as wasteful because you don't like the way one of those individuals chooses to control his good. But why is your opinion of how the good should be controlled more important than his?
Also, don't forget that if company A controls a good in way that his customer B does not like, and B decides to duplicate that good, A will be pressured to give into B's demands. But if the government prevents B from duplicating that good (because it would be "wasteful"), then A has nothing to fear, and very little reason to give into B's demands.
If what you're saying is correct, why are we always up in arms when oppressive governments censor internet access?
Because an oppressive government uses stolen money (i.e. taxes) to fund its operations, and it prevents competition through physical violence or violent threats. In contrast, a company must acquire its money by providing goods and services, and a company can not use violence or violent threats to stop competition. A company can only oppress you to the extent that you allow yourself to be oppressed.
Another poster mentioned that it's dangerous to allow a random CEO to price a provider out of the market. Yes, a CEO exercising his right to control his company's property on behalf of the shareholders is dangerous to your "freedom" to dictate to that company how they will use their property. However, I don't believe in your so-called freedom. Build your own damn network.
And no, I don't think the government has a right to control the internet because it was partially built with tax dollars. If the government has funded the internet infrastructure in the past, then the solution is for that money to be repaid to the government, and for the government, in turn, to return the money to the taxpayers. The solution is not to treat the internet as though it is a "public resource", because that is both immoral and inefficient.
Is it possible you just weren't listening to the right people?
Oh, I wasn't taking their advice. I've actually been making contratrian bets in the stock market, and I've been doing pretty good. I just don't think we should start revising history by saying that mainstream economists have been warning us for years. They were wrong (as usual) when they predicted all we would see is a general slow-down, and I, for one, will not forget that.
I've been seeing dire warnings about a real estate bust for the last five years at least.
From what I remember, most mainstream financial articles were predicting the market would start slowing down or cooling off, but that's about it. The argument was that houses are different from stocks. Oh, sure, housing prices might go down in the hottest markets, but historically, national housing prices have never fallen. Someone from the Fed was quoted as saying that housing is a local, local, local phenomenon. A recession? Not to worry, that's extremely unlikely.
But now, the mainstream opinion has changed. They'll say it's because the data has changed. But, that's the point of making a prediction, isn't it? To predict when and how the data will change?
Investment, OTOH, creates wealth.
I'm sorry, I don't see much difference between your gold and dollar scenario. When you receive income, there are three things you can do with that income: Spend it on consumption, spend it on investment, or hold it. Think of it like an election with only two candidates: Consumption and Investment. If you don't vote for either candidate, that just means the election will be decided by everyone else's votes. Choosing not to vote doesn't hurt anyone.
Let's say that you want to buy a stock that is priced in euros. You have been holding on to some form of money for one month, but now you are going to convert that form of money into euros and buy that stock. During that one month, however, holding that money was not "useless", because it provided you with something very valuable: Protection against uncertainty. But, after one month, you decided to "vote" for investment.
Notice that it doesn't matter if the form of money in the above example is gold or dollars. That's the point I'm trying to make. The consumption-investment ratio and the demand for money are not related. If people increase their demand for money (because they want to 'hoard' it), that will lower prices across the board, since an increased demand for money means people are willing to trade more goods for a single dollar. But the mere fact that people demand more money tells us nothing about how the money that is not held will be spent. Society could easily choose to keep the same consumption-investment ratio. So, "hoarding" money, whether that money is gold or dollars, is never a problem.
What do you think will happen to the "free market" when Russia & China move into the power vaccuum left by a U.S. retreat? Markets will close, resources will get diverted, the dollar will drop, etc etc etc.
Conflicts are often created when two parties try to reach for power. Perhaps by "withdrawing" from the world stage, we might stop a lot of international conflicts before they start. We have to stop focusing on the so-called "rights" of nations and communities, and start focusing on the individuals, whose rights and property are trampled on in these global conflicts. If you want to give private charity, or provide private security for individuals in other countries, then I'm all for it. But, let's get out of the nation-building business. It only leads to destruction of property and life, which is never good for any market.
And before anyone mentions Blackwater, let me add that any private security firm should be bound by standard laws...a private contractor who kills an innocent civilian should be treated the same way we would treat a police officer who kills an innocent person over here.
Isolationism is not possible in the global economy.
How is it "isolationist" to freely trade with every other nation in the world? We might not be engaging the world with bullets and bombs, but that doesn't mean we've isolated ourselves from it.
It would be hard to argue that we'd be better off if we found a way to hoard [oxygen] and make people pay for it.
But, you're ignoring the fact that human beings did not create or produce oxygen; we just found oxygen all around us. Books, movies, etc. are completely different, because people created those works.
Morality is concerned with human action, not just the current state of things. So, yes, creative works became plentiful after they were created. But that tells us nothing about whether or not it is moral to copy those works.
A similar argument would be, "Terrorist attacks and earthquakes are similar, because in both cases, a lot of people die. But we don't punish anyone for an earthquake, so why should we punish anyone for a terrorist attack?" The argument notes the final state of things (i.e. people died), but fails to ask the relevant moral question (i.e. How did people die?). In the same way, you note the final state of things (i.e. a certain type of good is plentiful), but fail to ask the relevant moral question (Why is that type of good plentiful?). And so, you draw no moral distinction between breathing oxygen and copying creative works.
Once you put up a blog or small store, and it becomes popular, and you suddenly get a bill from a large provider who's not even your provider, saying you either pay, or they'll block all their customers from visiting you, you might get it.
Get what? That someone I'm not directly paying doesn't owe me anything? Sounds fair to me. Get as much as you can for the service you provide, that's what I say. It's just a question of who needs who more. The stronger one will ask the weaker one to pay. Thus, the stronger one will increase his profits, and therefore attract more competition (provided there are no governmental barriers), and all will be right with the world.
But that means curing people. There's more money to be made in treating symptoms.
If so, that means that consumers are willing to pay more to treat symptoms than they are for a cure. In that case, consumers have only themselves to blame.
Alright, I will respond to your 911 service message.
So let's say the fixed costs for providing the 911 service is $1000 (costs for infrastructure, monitoring, etc). Let's say that the marginal cost for providing the 911 service to a given subscriber is $10.
"The" 911 service? On the free market, there can be competing emergency numbers. For example, take the following paragraph from For a New Liberty:
"In the first place, there is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire, that the government must supply "police protection," as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all. But in actual fact there is no absolute commodity called "police protection" any more than there is an absolute single commodity called "food" or "shelter." It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth. In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute 'protection.'"
Couldn't the same be said about "911 service"? How many 911 operators will there be to take your call? What sort of equipment will they be using? How friendly and trained will the 911 operators be? If there is a queue for anything at all, can I pay more to get to the front of the queue?
We want to supply all 100 people with the service, so to do that, we have to charge a max of $11 for the service.
I don't agree with your assumptions, so it follows that I won't agree with your conclusion, either. It's like saying, "Well, the poorest person will only pay $1.50 for a McDonald's cheeseburger, and we have to provide a cheesebruger to everyone in the area, so that means we'll lose $1000 every day..." You assume that there is only one good that can be provided in one way, and your entire scenario follows from that fallacy. I won't respond with hard numbers, because the problem is not your math.
Let me leave you with this quote from Rothbard:
"Free supply not only subsidizes the users at the expense of nonusing taxpayers; it also misallocates resources by failing to supply the service where it is most needed. The same is true, to a lesser extent, wherever the price is under the free-market price. On the free market, consumers can dictate the pricing and thereby assure the best allocation of productive resources to supply their wants. In a government enterprise, this cannot be done. Let us take again the case of the free service. Since there is no pricing, and therefore no exclusion of submarginal uses, there is no way that the government, even if it wanted to, could allocate its services to their most important uses and to the most eager buyers. All buyers, all uses, are artificially kept on the same plane. As a result, the most important uses will be slighted. The government is faced with insuperable allocation problems, which it cannot solve even to its own satisfaction. Thus, the government will be confronted with the problem: Should we build a road in place A or place B? There is no rational way whatever by which it can make this decision. It cannot aid the private consumers of the road in the best way. It can decide only according to the whim of the ruling government official, i.e., only if the government officials do the consuming, and not the public. If the government wishes to do what is best for the public, it is faced with an impossible task."