How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic, but simultaneously believe in science, which is based on the faith (for it is faith) that underlying all things is a universal set of rules which can be expressed using math, you are believing things which cannot simultaneously be. You are then forced to train yourself in doublethink -- and people do that: they terrify me. Basically forcing yourself to be schizophrenic is not a sane attitude. That is "being religious".
Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd. This is infuriating, but not the sign of mental imbalance. These people may think of themselves as religious, but they will probably become either non-believers or religious depending on what people around them pretend to think.
Fanaticism, to me, is not a mental illness. It is just people who have picked the religious view of the Universe and stuck with it. They are logical and consistent. This is why religion is in essence dangerous: because if you are just religious, you are trained in doublethink, and if you are really consistent, your are a fanatic.
In fact, putting all of central Africa in a lump is silly. There is more difference now within central Africa than there used to be between the first and third world in the 60s...
You can't put going to a concert, classical or modern in a CD! The music might be there, but this is only a small part of it.
The audience participates, the sights, the vibrations. All of the things making it worth going. Performers so dead they are like playing a CD are no performers at all.
Every recording is unique, and there is nothing like a live performance. So really there is no fear to be had about the livelihood of the players. Now the industry responsible for the distribution of the recordings... Well, they're evil anyway.
There is no such thing as the third World. It is a myth. There is a continuum of social and economic development. go to www.gapminder.org and see the world how it is.
Not even close. Since I've come here I have seen two type: the front loaders which do not wash and the agitators witch wash badly and destroy your stuff. We live in 2010, and elsewhere (everywhere outside the US and Canada, I guess), you get machines which are top or front loaded (depending on your preference, but the axis is always horizontal), which will wash and dry and take more volume of cloths for less volume of machine than the top loaders. Oh, and when they come out of the drying cycle, there are essentially no creases.
You are getting ripped of. Horribly. Demand better machines. Buy German.
No the point is that in Europe, this crap cannot even be sold, and is not found installed anywhere since at least 30 years. Convection ovens are supposed to be standard, you should not actually be able to find any other type (ok, aside from the super-high-end crazy wood ones).
Look, no European coming to the US in the last 30 years that I know of has anything good to say about the washing machines/ovens/cooking tops. The only good/cool thing found in a typical US kitchen when arriving from Europe is the fridge. If you can bear the noise.
Yes, gaz is more efficient -- for cooking. I like gaz when there is a connection. If price were not a factor, I'd go for induction, however. But I have no choice. I rent and thus must pick a place which has been set up. And I looked around a lot.
However, the fact that the monstrosities that are common here are essentially laughed at in developing countries says a lot. My hypothesis is that no government mandated efficiency targets coupled to a culture were cooking is unusual explains the kitchen. The washing machines however? I don't know. Conspiracies of clothes sellers hoping for rapid destruction come to mind.
Thank you for your link which also shows you have no clue what a kitchen oven is supposed to be.
Yes, I knew this exact comment would come. But is everyone starts saving kittens, you get the same problem...
And the government needs at that point to intervene and kill kittens. And people like you will say:
OMG GUV KILLZ KITTENS!
They can't win can they? Induhviduals are always right even when they are wrong, and govs always wrong even when they are right. You fail to comprehend the concept of externalities. Schumpeter's theory of choice is irrelevant. Hell, Milton Friedman was a dangerous leftist to you.
When a million morons decide to live in a cottage in suburbia, this is a collective choice. The collective consequence is congestion, pollution and stress.
The solution is to help/convince/entice people to go back to the centre of town.
when a million people decide to put their retirement money in AAA sub-prime loans, this is a collective choice. The collective consequence is a depression affecting all of us.
The solution is too complex to discuss here (if there is one at all) but if it exists, it clearly involves regulating the conditions under which one may or may not invest in something.
Like it or not, our decisions which we like to think of as individual are really collective choices: the consequences are collective also, and the solutions are also collective.
And I prefer a democratically elected body representing the collective to barter for the solution rather than hoping for it to emerge before many people get hurt.
Mandating more efficient bulbs is clearly not the will of the mob.Unless you live in an alternative universe were the mobs are mostly made up of technocrats.
Oh right "defense, infrastructure, and contract enforcement". Although infrastructure is a bit odd, I believe I am not wrong in thinking you are a libertarian. So living in an alternative universe where the industry makes more efficient widgets and sells them because a magical market operation.
Has it occurred to you that having a rationing quota of energy is an amazingly intrusive policy? One never seen outside of wars? That perhaps mandating efficiency is clearly and unambiguously the least intrusive option?
Collective choices have collective consequences, they are a matter of collective choice: the government, which represents you gets to decide. You may decide to freely do whatever you want, and if one of your externality-inducing habits becomes popular, the government gets to stop it. Because that is its job.
If it didn't, then it would fail at its fundamental role.
Thank you. But nothing will stop the people out to proclaim all that is touched by government Evil and Bad. I mean, if the government saved kittens, you would see rants about how it is creating a secret army of rampaging zombie socialist cats...
Look, I have to live in North America for a few years. Now I can see the consequences of the absence of gov regulations on efficiency. The washing machine is a model which is technologically on par with the cheapest model on sale in supermarkets in Morocco (I shit you not). It was hell getting a cooking surface in vitro-ceramics. Convection oven? No can do unless you import it from Germany and sell a couple organs.
It is a huge joke. Of course they can't sell their junk outside of America: the rest of the world has moved on, and although the transition to ever more efficient systems meant the the consumer had to pay a premium along the way, the end result is that the quality of everything you buy is so much better that after having seen it both ways, I can tell you: it is worth it.
Because the sad economic fact is that there is some price people are ready to buy for any widget. If the efficiency of the widget is mandated, you get the efficient widget at that price. Otherwise you get the cheap to manufacture widget at the same price. This is why the US is losing manufacturing to China, and Germany is not: there is plenty of room in the high end, there is infinite potential for innovation, but you have to help it happen. And people hate change: even if the alternative is in all ways better, they will not change (think linux and windows). Change is social. There is a strong role of government not in innovation, but in forcing companies to innovate, through the means of efficiency targets, for example.
Note to eventual moderators. I am trying to get a point across (in French after failing in English). I will probably fail, but hey, it's worth a try.
Alors on va essayer en français.
Imaginons la situation suivante: dans le désert, un voyageur a soif. Un génie lui propose une gourde pleine d'eau ou de l'or.
Le voyageur choisit naturellement l'eau (sauf dans les fables, où il sera puni).
L'eau et l'or n'ont de valeur autre que ce qu'on leur attribue. Et cette valeur dépend des circonstances. C'est en tout cas ce que la théorie économique moderne suppose.
Marx, lui, pense que les chose ont une valeur intrinsèque qui dépend de la quantité de travail fournie pour produire la chose, ici, miner et transporter l'or et de la rareté des choses. De la même manière les mercantilistes imaginent que la valeur des choses est intrinsèque (et se mesure en or) de sorte que la balance commerciale est importante.
C'est la même erreur fondamentale. Les choses ne valent rien en elles-même, la monnaie ne vaut rien, l'or ne vaut rien. Les choses ont une valeur seulement parce que nous, par une opération de l'esprit, leur attribuont de la valeur. Il en est ainsi de l'or. Croire en la valeur intrinsèque des choses, c'est le début de la théorie marxiste.
Gold is worth nothing. Actually, it is worth something because you can make shiny things with it (and in more recent times electronic components). It is worth something because people think it is worth something. Exactly like fiat money, except that it depends on mines for production instead of trees:) . For someone who is so adamantly anti-communist you believe very strongly in Marxist economics...
2. You will find that the blacksmith needs a mine, ore, miners for its raw material. That building/repairing his works requires the production of cement/a stone quarry. That he might know how to work iron, but not make alloys. That hunter-gatherer societies never expand because they die of hunger. You will find that knowledge and the availability of tools dwindle with time and isolation, until you are left with a very primitive society.
3. Yes, bad because bloody. Can you read?
4. No Somalia is a very unequal society, and has no functioning government. Sweden is a vary equal society with a very strong government. Eastern Europe/the USSR were very equal societies, but indicates equality/inequality is not so simple and the way it is achieved is very important. Also that the difference between good and bad equality is not intervention or not of the government. In fact, almost all societes on Earth have governments, some are very equal, some very unequal. Some are prosperous, some not. Government size is not very relevant. Its policies are, and you will find that absence of policy is not optimal.
5. No. a lot of the south American dictators had very small government, reduced to their regalian functions. And very unequal societies. And bloody oppression. Administration can be a tool for the oppression, but not always so.
6. Owners cannot regulate anything: they do not, cannot have the expertise required. The world is infinitely more complex than you imagine. And yes, you are talking to the equivalent of alien: our worlds are not the same, and yours is clearly very simple and very small. As an exercise, take any object around you, and try to think about how it was built. Think about the countless hours of ingenuity, work that go into the object, its part, the tools, the tools for the tools, the delivery, the marketing, how it was bought, how it was chosen, about the houses for the workers, the engineers, the design thereof, the schools and universities, the tools for writing the design, the knowledge, the artistic history of its design.
Marvel that we can do anything at all. Realise that society needs institutions. That you cal them government is not important.
7. So the company has more power than the gov? and the gov is too powerful? Or perhaps you live in a world too simply to be even remotely consistent.
I am not really talking to you, I am talking to the readers of this conversation. Because your ideas are noxious: they try to convince people that they should be at each other's throat instead of collaborating. You wish for a world were violence rules. You wish for a simple society where everything can be understood, thinking it would be better, despite the fact that such societies have existed and still exist, and are thoroughly undesirable.
You are like the people who would like to stop progress in the name of Nature, because they think they understand the XVIIth century. You are like the anarchist who think a brotherly society is possible only if everyone does everything in turn, forgetting this is was not even possible 2000 years ago.
Progress is complexity. A tool to manage a complex system is complex. Government have to be complex. This means that they will fail often, but they are still required.
About the gold: mercantilism was invented in the age of gold, before fiat money. And it almost made sense then: you could only grow your economy if there was enough gold. Of course this is stupid, but it was thus then. Now it truly makes no sense at all.
About the 100 people: thank you for proving you live in a fantasy world. You clearly have no notion of the complexity and the sheer number of intervening parties required for the making of the simplest of the devices you may buy. Hint: you are wrong by about seven orders of magnitude (this number is not made up, it is a reasonable estimate of the population in the so-called developed world contributing to production off all goods and services, which in turn are all interdependent). This is being amazingly wrong.
The USSR was not wrong because it sought equality. It was wrong because it enforced it bloodily. It was not inefficient because it was brutal, it was inefficient because it believed the labour theory of value. Which is wrong: a glass of water has not the same value whether you are thirsty or not.
It is very inefficient to have a highly unequal society for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. Equality of opportunity is not just about equal access to education and capital. For these to be meaningful, wealth must not be allowed to accumulate -- meaning earning taxes, and high inheritance taxes, and a suitably high inflation. Because those born in wealthy families always will have a head start, but at least you can make sure that they have to keep working hard to stay wealthy... This means that welfare, which is about keeping people in a state where they can keep looking for (self-)employment is a function of government to achieve equality of opportunity.
Unless life is Russian roulette, and you get a single shot at trying things.
The belief that government can be reduced to a pure regalian minimum is silly: it makes sense in a dictatorship, where the welfare of the people is not a prime concern, but in the case of a democracy, putting the onus of finding out who is breaking laws on the victims is somewhat ridiculous (basically, you are saying that having enough professional assassins on payroll should be a good idea: no live victims/relatives, no lawsuit!)
Oh, you did not mean it like that. But then you need agencies to check for abuses! Control and regulation are a function of government.
Also, there is a myth, a mythology of the business, started from nothing. This happens, but is rare. It should be encouraged, but not at the cost of the rest of society. Success which costs society is no success at all: think microsoft... Again, powerful regulation agencies are important. You need to be consistent: either the gov stifles businesses through regulations, which means no business becomes powerful enough to be influential, or business can influence regulations, which is clearly a case for more power to the gov, not to the businesses!
According to the "trade balance" view of economy, selling your house/furniture/gadgets/clothes/food to your neighbours to replace it all by a pile of gold made you richer.
According to the "trade balance" view of economy, as son as some good leaves the country to be replaced by some gold, something positive happened. As soon as some good entered the country and some gold left it something bad happened.
This view of economy is so moronically stupid it is frightening.
According to the "government is evil" view of economy, the existence of laws is a perversion to be fought.
According to the "government is evil" view of economy, it is okay to let restaurants/corporations/(rich) individuals poison their neighbours because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening (but laws are evil, so some ad-hoc mechanism for determining damage need to be established.)
Fact: if the productive people of Atlas Shrugged all went to an island where there would be no "oppression", they would quickly degenerate in a pre-stone age society (there are real-world examples of this: a rich society is a large society, even though it might seem to be composed of dull individuals). We are collectively rich as we are because we are all interlinked through exchange of goods, services, ideas. For society to function, markets must function. For that, government intervention is required. To break monopolies, to forbid or compensate externalities, to impose transparency. To impose a measure of equality.
Fact: is that even the very rich and successful need the great masses much more than the masses need them. Equality must be imposed: markets work because the collective decisions f the agents are better than the individual actions. A very unequal society depends on the actions and choice of a small minority, and therefore cannot form functioning markets. If you believe in markets, you must believe in redistribution of wealth. Otherwise, you believe not in markets but in magic.
1) Is an assumption not verified by fact: high frequency trading as example. 2) No. Pricing is also the result of the disparities of knowledge. For example, insurance companies are profitable. Despite your potentially superior knowledge of statistics, you still cannot beat them... See also casinos. 3) Is clearly wrong: competing parasites are not a good thing for the host as there is twice as much intelligence devoted to exploitation. Think also of repeated prisoner's dilemma, and the natural tendencies of cartels to form. 4) Externalities can perfectly be larger than the gains of all participants in a transaction. Also there is no reason the believe all transactions are "free": You may have to take this job or die of hunger, even if this job will consume all your time and ability to eventually get a better one.
The tea party is a bunch of bigots. Maybe the polite way of saying that is "religious and socially conservative". To me this is equivalent to bigotry. But this is not why they are wrong... They are wrong because like you, after I just demonstrated (and you agreed) that with a perfect market taxes are irrelevant, you still believe simultaneously that markets are perfect and taxes are wrong. I have only observed this kind of suspension of logic when discussing with fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. Now I have met a free-market fundamentalist, and I am glad of this experience.
shorter: "I am a libertarian, and nothing will convince me"
The dead giveaway is thinking social security and amtrak are harmful. No point in having a discussion there, I guess -- letting people die is better than giving them money, and presumably roads are ok, but not rail, based on some warped notion that in one case you get to pick the colour of your vehicle.
Then of course giving examples which show the importance of contract law (government established and enforced), Justice system (Judiciary is an equal branch of government), And then a bizarre dispute between neighbours where apparently having a bunch of private owners cut utilities to another is deemed acceptable behaviour (hint: it's not -- if you cannot imagine cases of abuse, you sorely lack imagination). I will not even comment on the last example.
But for the markets... The point is that an imperfect market does not self correct. It will tend to monopolies, it will boom and bust, it will create externalities. In general, it is perfectly capable of mis-attributing resource as badly as Stalin's administration. All your beliefs lie on the assumption market self-correct, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Think about this: if markets self-correct, all actions that the government takes have no effect, because they are automatically compensated by the market. Hence, you must believe fiscal policy has no effect, nor monetary policy. Therefore, your original argument about taxes is bunk, because it is (based on the perfect market assumption) just some pure externality which will be compensated for by the magical self-correcting market.
For example: taxes are a cost imposed on your income. Now, based on that you can in a magical self-correcting market issue a bond indexed on the expected increase of your income which will compensate for the increase of taxes. This bond can then be traded as a liquidity (because your believe in a magical self-correcting market) And thus you have no taxes: some numeral became debt, your nominal income never grew. However, because of the magical market, your purchasing power increased.
Shorter: you are wrong in the same way people believing in pink flying unicorns are wrong.
The difference between you and me is that you believe many things, whereas I read recent academic literature. Markets don't work unless you force them to.
It is desirable to have working markets, which work for the benefit of the greater number. Thus some external force needs to be applied in that direction. The one institutional entity which represents the will of the people is the government. [1]
The fact that it fails in its duty is not proof that it is not its duty, just that it should try harder/better/with more intelligence. You don't fire a doctor each time a patient dies... You investigate and make sure it does not happen again in the same way.
About technologies and monopoly: you will tell me how on a single track of rails more than one company can efficiently run a service. Or how individual consumers can effectively decide which utility will provide their water?
[1] The great failure of communism comes from the belief that the value of things is the sum of the work put into them, and trying to distribute goods based on such a pricing scheme. This is wrong: things have the value buyers and sellers attribute to them, and this value is neither fixed nor unique. For the exact same reason, markets fail if this information is not available to buyer and seller: negotiation cannot happen, and commerce is impossible. Transparency must be enforced. Terms must be enforced. Externalities must be offset at a societal level.
I see you deeply believe that the market can regulate itself. This is cute, but very obviously wrong. The market corrects itself, provided enough time and if a very restrictive set of conditions are met (in general, they are not). For example any technology which can give rise to the formation of a monopoly will: and by definition, a monopoly is not a free market. Thus, you need oversight, lest some parts of society hold others at ransom, with no accountability.
The arbiter needs to be the government, because it is the only institution where every citizen has (at least nominally) an equal power, which does not depend on wealth or luck. Of course, this never happens quite like that, but is still infinitely more fair than if things were entirely run for commercial purposes. Lawsuits clearly are much less effective than legislation to curb pollution. Because a business has no interest, no in fact a straight disincentive to do the right thing if it is allowed to.
Because that would hurt the bottom line. And because the competition does not chain itself... You should read on negative externalities, some day.
As for the duty of paying taxes... What if I'm a hobo? what if I just went bankrupt? What if I would pay less than the cost of processing my forms? I know where this beliefs that everyone would pay comes from: it is for the same reason people are against free public transport, despite the fact that the (subsidised) tickets bring in less than the salary of the controllers: a belief that if things are free, they will be abused. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes not. Usually, people have strong opinions on that without caring about facts.
About your hypothetical investor which would not do what the US does: yes, this is precisely the point. No investor would be stupid enough to fund fundamental research: the odds are way too long. No investor would pay for schools and universities at a loss, and yet is is extremely valuable for the US as a whole. No investor would pay for a legislative body to legislate on everything: this is too vague, and too risky. No investor would pay for an army which would not be used for the most part. And investor would never pay for building highways, hoping for hypothetical rise in interstate commerce. No investor would pay for a Justice system which spends most of its time treating petty crime at a loss. No investor would pay for agencies responsible for checking for the safety of food, and water and medicine: he has no stake in that.
This is not the question of having a nanny state. It is a question of making sure that the markets run undistorted. And that implies quite a bit of oversight, most of it intended to make certain practises less efficient. Sad, but necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic, but simultaneously believe in science, which is based on the faith (for it is faith) that underlying all things is a universal set of rules which can be expressed using math, you are believing things which cannot simultaneously be. You are then forced to train yourself in doublethink -- and people do that: they terrify me. Basically forcing yourself to be schizophrenic is not a sane attitude. That is "being religious".
Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd. This is infuriating, but not the sign of mental imbalance. These people may think of themselves as religious, but they will probably become either non-believers or religious depending on what people around them pretend to think.
Fanaticism, to me, is not a mental illness. It is just people who have picked the religious view of the Universe and stuck with it. They are logical and consistent. This is why religion is in essence dangerous: because if you are just religious, you are trained in doublethink, and if you are really consistent, your are a fanatic.
There is a continuum of countries between the OECD and Zimbabwe.
http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/gapminder-world-map/
In fact, putting all of central Africa in a lump is silly. There is more difference now within central Africa than there used to be between the first and third world in the 60s...
You can't put going to a concert, classical or modern in a CD! The music might be there, but this is only a small part of it.
The audience participates, the sights, the vibrations. All of the things making it worth going. Performers so dead they are like playing a CD are no performers at all.
No, it's like calling octarine a myth. An abstraction serves as some form of approximation, containing some but not all information.
There is no third world, or if there is, there is also a first and a half, a second, a fourth and all in between.
There was a Third world in the sixties. Then, it made some sense: there was a gap between the rich countries and the rest. Now, not anymore.
Every recording is unique, and there is nothing like a live performance. So really there is no fear to be had about the livelihood of the players. Now the industry responsible for the distribution of the recordings... Well, they're evil anyway.
There is no such thing as the third World. It is a myth. There is a continuum of social and economic development. go to www.gapminder.org and see the world how it is.
You have a washer and dryer separate? This is good for industrial setups. At home, there is no point.
HAHAHAHA.
Not even close. Since I've come here I have seen two type: the front loaders which do not wash and the agitators witch wash badly and destroy your stuff. We live in 2010, and elsewhere (everywhere outside the US and Canada, I guess), you get machines which are top or front loaded (depending on your preference, but the axis is always horizontal), which will wash and dry and take more volume of cloths for less volume of machine than the top loaders. Oh, and when they come out of the drying cycle, there are essentially no creases.
You are getting ripped of. Horribly. Demand better machines. Buy German.
No the point is that in Europe, this crap cannot even be sold, and is not found installed anywhere since at least 30 years. Convection ovens are supposed to be standard, you should not actually be able to find any other type (ok, aside from the super-high-end crazy wood ones).
Look, no European coming to the US in the last 30 years that I know of has anything good to say about the washing machines/ovens/cooking tops. The only good/cool thing found in a typical US kitchen when arriving from Europe is the fridge. If you can bear the noise.
Set kitchens? For rental?
Yes, gaz is more efficient -- for cooking. I like gaz when there is a connection. If price were not a factor, I'd go for induction, however. But I have no choice. I rent and thus must pick a place which has been set up. And I looked around a lot.
However, the fact that the monstrosities that are common here are essentially laughed at in developing countries says a lot. My hypothesis is that no government mandated efficiency targets coupled to a culture were cooking is unusual explains the kitchen. The washing machines however? I don't know. Conspiracies of clothes sellers hoping for rapid destruction come to mind.
Thank you for your link which also shows you have no clue what a kitchen oven is supposed to be.
Yes, I knew this exact comment would come. But is everyone starts saving kittens, you get the same problem...
And the government needs at that point to intervene and kill kittens. And people like you will say:
OMG GUV KILLZ KITTENS!
They can't win can they? Induhviduals are always right even when they are wrong, and govs always wrong even when they are right. You fail to comprehend the concept of externalities. Schumpeter's theory of choice is irrelevant. Hell, Milton Friedman was a dangerous leftist to you.
When a million morons decide to live in a cottage in suburbia, this is a collective choice. The collective consequence is congestion, pollution and stress.
The solution is to help/convince/entice people to go back to the centre of town.
when a million people decide to put their retirement money in AAA sub-prime loans, this is a collective choice. The collective consequence is a depression affecting all of us.
The solution is too complex to discuss here (if there is one at all) but if it exists, it clearly involves regulating the conditions under which one may or may not invest in something.
Like it or not, our decisions which we like to think of as individual are really collective choices: the consequences are collective also, and the solutions are also collective.
And I prefer a democratically elected body representing the collective to barter for the solution rather than hoping for it to emerge before many people get hurt.
Mandating more efficient bulbs is clearly not the will of the mob.Unless you live in an alternative universe were the mobs are mostly made up of technocrats.
Oh right "defense, infrastructure, and contract enforcement". Although infrastructure is a bit odd, I believe I am not wrong in thinking you are a libertarian. So living in an alternative universe where the industry makes more efficient widgets and sells them because a magical market operation.
This does not happen in the real world.
Has it occurred to you that having a rationing quota of energy is an amazingly intrusive policy? One never seen outside of wars? That perhaps mandating efficiency is clearly and unambiguously the least intrusive option?
Collective choices have collective consequences, they are a matter of collective choice: the government, which represents you gets to decide. You may decide to freely do whatever you want, and if one of your externality-inducing habits becomes popular, the government gets to stop it. Because that is its job.
If it didn't, then it would fail at its fundamental role.
Thank you. But nothing will stop the people out to proclaim all that is touched by government Evil and Bad. I mean, if the government saved kittens, you would see rants about how it is creating a secret army of rampaging zombie socialist cats...
Look, I have to live in North America for a few years. Now I can see the consequences of the absence of gov regulations on efficiency. The washing machine is a model which is technologically on par with the cheapest model on sale in supermarkets in Morocco (I shit you not). It was hell getting a cooking surface in vitro-ceramics. Convection oven? No can do unless you import it from Germany and sell a couple organs.
It is a huge joke. Of course they can't sell their junk outside of America: the rest of the world has moved on, and although the transition to ever more efficient systems meant the the consumer had to pay a premium along the way, the end result is that the quality of everything you buy is so much better that after having seen it both ways, I can tell you: it is worth it.
Because the sad economic fact is that there is some price people are ready to buy for any widget. If the efficiency of the widget is mandated, you get the efficient widget at that price. Otherwise you get the cheap to manufacture widget at the same price. This is why the US is losing manufacturing to China, and Germany is not: there is plenty of room in the high end, there is infinite potential for innovation, but you have to help it happen. And people hate change: even if the alternative is in all ways better, they will not change (think linux and windows). Change is social. There is a strong role of government not in innovation, but in forcing companies to innovate, through the means of efficiency targets, for example.
Note to eventual moderators. I am trying to get a point across (in French after failing in English). I will probably fail, but hey, it's worth a try.
Alors on va essayer en français.
Imaginons la situation suivante: dans le désert, un voyageur a soif. Un génie lui propose une gourde pleine d'eau ou de l'or.
Le voyageur choisit naturellement l'eau (sauf dans les fables, où il sera puni).
L'eau et l'or n'ont de valeur autre que ce qu'on leur attribue. Et cette valeur dépend des circonstances. C'est en tout cas ce que la théorie économique moderne suppose.
Marx, lui, pense que les chose ont une valeur intrinsèque qui dépend de la quantité de travail fournie pour produire la chose, ici, miner et transporter l'or et de la rareté des choses. De la même manière les mercantilistes imaginent que la valeur des choses est intrinsèque (et se mesure en or) de sorte que la balance commerciale est importante.
C'est la même erreur fondamentale. Les choses ne valent rien en elles-même, la monnaie ne vaut rien, l'or ne vaut rien. Les choses ont une valeur seulement parce que nous, par une opération de l'esprit, leur attribuont de la valeur. Il en est ainsi de l'or. Croire en la valeur intrinsèque des choses, c'est le début de la théorie marxiste.
Gold is worth nothing. Actually, it is worth something because you can make shiny things with it (and in more recent times electronic components). It is worth something because people think it is worth something. Exactly like fiat money, except that it depends on mines for production instead of trees:) . For someone who is so adamantly anti-communist you believe very strongly in Marxist economics...
2. You will find that the blacksmith needs a mine, ore, miners for its raw material. That building/repairing his works requires the production of cement/a stone quarry. That he might know how to work iron, but not make alloys. That hunter-gatherer societies never expand because they die of hunger. You will find that knowledge and the availability of tools dwindle with time and isolation, until you are left with a very primitive society.
3. Yes, bad because bloody. Can you read?
4. No Somalia is a very unequal society, and has no functioning government. Sweden is a vary equal society with a very strong government. Eastern Europe/the USSR were very equal societies, but indicates equality/inequality is not so simple and the way it is achieved is very important. Also that the difference between good and bad equality is not intervention or not of the government. In fact, almost all societes on Earth have governments, some are very equal, some very unequal. Some are prosperous, some not. Government size is not very relevant. Its policies are, and you will find that absence of policy is not optimal.
5. No. a lot of the south American dictators had very small government, reduced to their regalian functions. And very unequal societies. And bloody oppression. Administration can be a tool for the oppression, but not always so.
6. Owners cannot regulate anything: they do not, cannot have the expertise required. The world is infinitely more complex than you imagine. And yes, you are talking to the equivalent of alien: our worlds are not the same, and yours is clearly very simple and very small. As an exercise, take any object around you, and try to think about how it was built. Think about the countless hours of ingenuity, work that go into the object, its part, the tools, the tools for the tools, the delivery, the marketing, how it was bought, how it was chosen, about the houses for the workers, the engineers, the design thereof, the schools and universities, the tools for writing the design, the knowledge, the artistic history of its design.
Marvel that we can do anything at all. Realise that society needs institutions. That you cal them government is not important.
7. So the company has more power than the gov? and the gov is too powerful? Or perhaps you live in a world too simply to be even remotely consistent.
I am not really talking to you, I am talking to the readers of this conversation. Because your ideas are noxious: they try to convince people that they should be at each other's throat instead of collaborating. You wish for a world were violence rules. You wish for a simple society where everything can be understood, thinking it would be better, despite the fact that such societies have existed and still exist, and are thoroughly undesirable.
You are like the people who would like to stop progress in the name of Nature, because they think they understand the XVIIth century. You are like the anarchist who think a brotherly society is possible only if everyone does everything in turn, forgetting this is was not even possible 2000 years ago.
Progress is complexity. A tool to manage a complex system is complex. Government have to be complex. This means that they will fail often, but they are still required.
About the gold: mercantilism was invented in the age of gold, before fiat money. And it almost made sense then: you could only grow your economy if there was enough gold. Of course this is stupid, but it was thus then. Now it truly makes no sense at all.
About the 100 people: thank you for proving you live in a fantasy world. You clearly have no notion of the complexity and the sheer number of intervening parties required for the making of the simplest of the devices you may buy. Hint: you are wrong by about seven orders of magnitude (this number is not made up, it is a reasonable estimate of the population in the so-called developed world contributing to production off all goods and services, which in turn are all interdependent). This is being amazingly wrong.
The USSR was not wrong because it sought equality. It was wrong because it enforced it bloodily. It was not inefficient because it was brutal, it was inefficient because it believed the labour theory of value. Which is wrong: a glass of water has not the same value whether you are thirsty or not.
It is very inefficient to have a highly unequal society for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. Equality of opportunity is not just about equal access to education and capital. For these to be meaningful, wealth must not be allowed to accumulate -- meaning earning taxes, and high inheritance taxes, and a suitably high inflation. Because those born in wealthy families always will have a head start, but at least you can make sure that they have to keep working hard to stay wealthy... This means that welfare, which is about keeping people in a state where they can keep looking for (self-)employment is a function of government to achieve equality of opportunity.
Unless life is Russian roulette, and you get a single shot at trying things.
The belief that government can be reduced to a pure regalian minimum is silly: it makes sense in a dictatorship, where the welfare of the people is not a prime concern, but in the case of a democracy, putting the onus of finding out who is breaking laws on the victims is somewhat ridiculous (basically, you are saying that having enough professional assassins on payroll should be a good idea: no live victims/relatives, no lawsuit!)
Oh, you did not mean it like that. But then you need agencies to check for abuses! Control and regulation are a function of government.
Also, there is a myth, a mythology of the business, started from nothing. This happens, but is rare. It should be encouraged, but not at the cost of the rest of society. Success which costs society is no success at all: think microsoft... Again, powerful regulation agencies are important. You need to be consistent: either the gov stifles businesses through regulations, which means no business becomes powerful enough to be influential, or business can influence regulations, which is clearly a case for more power to the gov, not to the businesses!
According to the "trade balance" view of economy, selling your house/furniture/gadgets/clothes/food to your neighbours to replace it all by a pile of gold made you richer.
According to the "trade balance" view of economy, as son as some good leaves the country to be replaced by some gold, something positive happened. As soon as some good entered the country and some gold left it something bad happened.
This view of economy is so moronically stupid it is frightening.
According to the "government is evil" view of economy, the existence of laws is a perversion to be fought.
According to the "government is evil" view of economy, it is okay to let restaurants/corporations/(rich) individuals poison their neighbours because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening (but laws are evil, so some ad-hoc mechanism for determining damage need to be established.)
Fact: if the productive people of Atlas Shrugged all went to an island where there would be no "oppression", they would quickly degenerate in a pre-stone age society (there are real-world examples of this: a rich society is a large society, even though it might seem to be composed of dull individuals). We are collectively rich as we are because we are all interlinked through exchange of goods, services, ideas. For society to function, markets must function. For that, government intervention is required. To break monopolies, to forbid or compensate externalities, to impose transparency. To impose a measure of equality.
Fact: is that even the very rich and successful need the great masses much more than the masses need them. Equality must be imposed: markets work because the collective decisions f the agents are better than the individual actions. A very unequal society depends on the actions and choice of a small minority, and therefore cannot form functioning markets. If you believe in markets, you must believe in redistribution of wealth. Otherwise, you believe not in markets but in magic.
1) Is an assumption not verified by fact: high frequency trading as example.
2) No. Pricing is also the result of the disparities of knowledge. For example, insurance companies are profitable. Despite your potentially superior knowledge of statistics, you still cannot beat them... See also casinos.
3) Is clearly wrong: competing parasites are not a good thing for the host as there is twice as much intelligence devoted to exploitation. Think also of repeated prisoner's dilemma, and the natural tendencies of cartels to form.
4) Externalities can perfectly be larger than the gains of all participants in a transaction. Also there is no reason the believe all transactions are "free": You may have to take this job or die of hunger, even if this job will consume all your time and ability to eventually get a better one.
The tea party is a bunch of bigots. Maybe the polite way of saying that is "religious and socially conservative". To me this is equivalent to bigotry. But this is not why they are wrong... They are wrong because like you, after I just demonstrated (and you agreed) that with a perfect market taxes are irrelevant, you still believe simultaneously that markets are perfect and taxes are wrong. I have only observed this kind of suspension of logic when discussing with fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. Now I have met a free-market fundamentalist, and I am glad of this experience.
shorter: "I am a libertarian, and nothing will convince me"
The dead giveaway is thinking social security and amtrak are harmful. No point in having a discussion there, I guess -- letting people die is better than giving them money, and presumably roads are ok, but not rail, based on some warped notion that in one case you get to pick the colour of your vehicle.
Then of course giving examples which show the importance of contract law (government established and enforced), Justice system (Judiciary is an equal branch of government), And then a bizarre dispute between neighbours where apparently having a bunch of private owners cut utilities to another is deemed acceptable behaviour (hint: it's not -- if you cannot imagine cases of abuse, you sorely lack imagination). I will not even comment on the last example.
But for the markets... The point is that an imperfect market does not self correct. It will tend to monopolies, it will boom and bust, it will create externalities. In general, it is perfectly capable of mis-attributing resource as badly as Stalin's administration. All your beliefs lie on the assumption market self-correct, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Think about this: if markets self-correct, all actions that the government takes have no effect, because they are automatically compensated by the market. Hence, you must believe fiscal policy has no effect, nor monetary policy. Therefore, your original argument about taxes is bunk, because it is (based on the perfect market assumption) just some pure externality which will be compensated for by the magical self-correcting market.
For example: taxes are a cost imposed on your income. Now, based on that you can in a magical self-correcting market issue a bond indexed on the expected increase of your income which will compensate for the increase of taxes. This bond can then be traded as a liquidity (because your believe in a magical self-correcting market) And thus you have no taxes: some numeral became debt, your nominal income never grew. However, because of the magical market, your purchasing power increased.
Shorter: you are wrong in the same way people believing in pink flying unicorns are wrong.
The difference between you and me is that you believe many things, whereas I read recent academic literature. Markets don't work unless you force them to.
It is desirable to have working markets, which work for the benefit of the greater number. Thus some external force needs to be applied in that direction. The one institutional entity which represents the will of the people is the government. [1]
The fact that it fails in its duty is not proof that it is not its duty, just that it should try harder/better/with more intelligence. You don't fire a doctor each time a patient dies... You investigate and make sure it does not happen again in the same way.
About technologies and monopoly: you will tell me how on a single track of rails more than one company can efficiently run a service. Or how individual consumers can effectively decide which utility will provide their water?
[1] The great failure of communism comes from the belief that the value of things is the sum of the work put into them, and trying to distribute goods based on such a pricing scheme. This is wrong: things have the value buyers and sellers attribute to them, and this value is neither fixed nor unique. For the exact same reason, markets fail if this information is not available to buyer and seller: negotiation cannot happen, and commerce is impossible. Transparency must be enforced. Terms must be enforced. Externalities must be offset at a societal level.
Thank you for calling me foolish.
I see you deeply believe that the market can regulate itself. This is cute, but very obviously wrong. The market corrects itself, provided enough time and if a very restrictive set of conditions are met (in general, they are not). For example any technology which can give rise to the formation of a monopoly will: and by definition, a monopoly is not a free market. Thus, you need oversight, lest some parts of society hold others at ransom, with no accountability.
The arbiter needs to be the government, because it is the only institution where every citizen has (at least nominally) an equal power, which does not depend on wealth or luck. Of course, this never happens quite like that, but is still infinitely more fair than if things were entirely run for commercial purposes. Lawsuits clearly are much less effective than legislation to curb pollution. Because a business has no interest, no in fact a straight disincentive to do the right thing if it is allowed to.
Because that would hurt the bottom line. And because the competition does not chain itself... You should read on negative externalities, some day.
As for the duty of paying taxes... What if I'm a hobo? what if I just went bankrupt? What if I would pay less than the cost of processing my forms? I know where this beliefs that everyone would pay comes from: it is for the same reason people are against free public transport, despite the fact that the (subsidised) tickets bring in less than the salary of the controllers: a belief that if things are free, they will be abused. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes not. Usually, people have strong opinions on that without caring about facts.
About your hypothetical investor which would not do what the US does: yes, this is precisely the point. No investor would be stupid enough to fund fundamental research: the odds are way too long. No investor would pay for schools and universities at a loss, and yet is is extremely valuable for the US as a whole. No investor would pay for a legislative body to legislate on everything: this is too vague, and too risky. No investor would pay for an army which would not be used for the most part. And investor would never pay for building highways, hoping for hypothetical rise in interstate commerce. No investor would pay for a Justice system which spends most of its time treating petty crime at a loss. No investor would pay for agencies responsible for checking for the safety of food, and water and medicine: he has no stake in that.
This is not the question of having a nanny state. It is a question of making sure that the markets run undistorted. And that implies quite a bit of oversight, most of it intended to make certain practises less efficient. Sad, but necessary.