Done "correctly," HFC is bad for society because, like insider trading done "correctly," it specifically screws the "have nots" to benefit the "haves."
- 1. The only TRUE insiders are all in government and they CAN trade on their insider information. Gov't makes the rules, so when a congressman trades something with prior knowledge of the new law, or if somebody in FDA knows the outcome of a drug testing and then they trade on it, etc., that's real insider trading. All other trading done by individuals that run companies is not the same thing, they don't make the law.
2. For some reason you think that it is wrong that 'haves' are benefited while 'have nots' are not. Yes, a person who owns a HFT server is in a better position than a person that is not.
That is not a problem, it is no more a problem than a person who owns an excavator is a problem, because there are many people who dig with shovels.
Here is the real problem: gov't insider trading and gov't meddling with the economy, so that there is less actual economic activity and a huge proportion of 'economic' activity is moved to a trading floor.
In truth it it is just a mechanism to suck wealth away from those who actually create it
- says you.
"In truth" - 2 funny words. Where did you get that truth, at the bottom of your coffee mug?
Stock market trading is about most efficient distribution of resources, the problem is not with HFT, they MAY or MAY NOT be a problem, but the real problem is that the gov't protects monopolies and prevents people from doing business the way they want to.
I am sure we'd see tens or hundreds or thousands more of various types of stock exchanges open within a year if there were no government laws that protect monopolies that are in existence today (all of the laws regarding securities exchange, all of the Patriot Act and money laundering nonsense, etc.etc., all of this prevents people from running their own stock exchange companies and protects existing large corporations).
Maybe there is a market for a stock exchange company that would only trade certain types of stock with specific limits imposed upon trading speeds. If there is a market for it, it would be formed, somebody would start that business and would make a profit in it thus finding out that it indeed was a good business idea.
Nobody can truly know whether HFT is good or bad, nobody can truly know what exactly should be the limits on trading and whether there should be limits. But we do know that we cannot find out answers to these questions because of the way the government is involved in all of the money changing operations and thus it prevents market from figuring out these very interesting questions.
They can be seduced, confused, mislead, or pressured into a sub-optimal buying decision.
- that's always the case and with more power stolen by the government those people end up in government, doing much more damage than they could ever do in the private sector under free market, because government has power that no private sector entity has - threat of violence, which is unfortunately legal (or perceived as legal). This means that a con artist in the private sector will be discovered and then the con will stop, the people do not have to give him their money.
In gov't the con goes on forever because it's the law. Thus Madoff is in jail and his operation is shut down, but most importantly people wouldn't give him their money willingly anymore, but the Federal reserve, SS, Medicare, wars, all of this continues (and Bernanke is still the chairman of the Fed, it's not about the chairman of-course in gov't, it's about the position itself).
When marketing misleads, seduces, or pressures people into buying a sub-optimal choice, that reduces productivity.
- this is a non-issue, this is not a problem that should ever have gov't involvement anyway. Yes, there are con artists and yes the marketing is about telling you things you want to hear.
That's why in free market your good name is important, your brand is important, you want to maintain a good name and a good brand, because information travels fast, especially the more evolved the means of communications are.
By the way, when Apple sells something at a premium, it DOES NOT LIE. It sells the name, the brand, people want to buy into it, it's their business. Nobody should be standing in their path, telling them that they are stupid for buying into the brand while there are all these alternatives. They know about the alternatives, they don't care, because they want that brand.
It is not a problem at all that somebody pays Apple more than they would have paid Samsung for example, this is what the free market does - it sends signals to other people in the market that there are MORE PROFITS that can be made and so more competition is created.
A company that is very successful is its own destructive force, it will destroy its very successful business model, because as long as it can get all these premiums, there will be competitors who will want part of that action, and the bigger the success story is, the more competition will want a piece of that pie.
Government stands in the way of the competition though, with all the patents and copyrights, all the ways that a company like Apple can sue another company, a competitor, only because the government creates that environment, where suing somebody over patents and copyrights is possible and that's what a SMART company would do in this rigged market (rigged, because of patents and copyrights). It makes absolute sense to fight competitors not only with good products but in court, because the government provides this ability.
And that's why you are full of shit, I didn't attack charity, I attacked the notion that business people "don't contribute to society" and that government stealing productivity of people to redistribute it in various way is charity, it's not.
First, it's not a utopia. Every business out there exists to provide the market with something market wants or needs and as long as it's not a government mandated need, and it is not a gov't subsidised business, it can only survive by satisfying the consumer demand, what else do you think people do at work? Do you think they are sitting there, figuring out ways NOT to satisfy consumer demand? How do you propose they SELL something to somebody without giving them something useful or needed?
Secondly, you are right, most people do not end up starting their own businesses, and that's fine, because unfortunately businesses cannot run without hiring outside workers, and thus the people who do not start their own businesses become those workers, and there is a market for their service, like for everything else.
A person who is working for somebody else is SELLING HIS SERVICE, and he competes with other people in trying to sell his service to employers.
By the way, figuring out what people want and then doing it is what the free market capitalism all about (free market, as in without gov't intervention). In capitalism the means of production are privately owned and in the free market the government is not allowed to meddle with individuals, businesses, labour, money, insurance, education, any of it. USA used to do it right, today unfortunately it's China that is doing it most right.
Do you think the Chinese people who start their own businesses (and somebody starts a business every day in China), do you think they have to invent a completely new paradigm? Do you think that it takes an inventor to start a new business, do you think it has to be a completely new, previously unknown idea?
Thinking that is the absolutely wrong way to look at it. It's not about inventing a never before seen product (like iPad for example), it's about taking an idea and implementing it, WHATEVER the idea is. If the people - customers end up paying for it and there is some profit generated, then it's likely a good idea, even if it is just a pop-corn stand on an intersection where there was no popcorn stand previously.
If all the jobs disappeared today, because all of them could be done automatically, would you say the economy got weaker? That's what Krugman would say, he'd immediately call for all governments of the world to hire all these unemployed people to do anything, anything at all - dig ditches and cover them back with dirt, anything, as long as they are doing some form of work.
Well why the fuck would we want that? That's the dumbest idea in the world - taking possibly productive individuals and handing them over to government, so they can draw a subsidy, while doing something completely worthless and unproductive.
People are productive, people become productive when they must.
The reason why immigrants start so many businesses is because they must - because they don't have a settled network, they can't and they don't expect somebody to help them much, so they try to figure out how to CREATE a business - open a shoe shining stand, a hot dog stand, a repair shop, start a delivery business, do whatever it takes, and if they are successful it means they have created value, created a service or a product that the market is willing to pay for with enough overhead that there is profit in it.
This is not a zero sum game, we don't take away from anybody by creating a successful business as long as it's not mandated by gov't, not protected by gov't, not regulated in order to create a monopoly, etc.
What do you expect people to do between their position being eliminated and such a "something else" being discovered?
- I expect them to BE the people that discover it. Nobody should wait for somebody else to 'discover' something to do. What we should all be doing - looking for something people want and then do it.
-- Patents, copyrights shouldn't exist, neither should any 'exclusive' public utility rights.
Just once, I read it this year and wrote a short review of it as well, It's not the best book by Rand, I liked Fountainhead more and it's definitely not the best book on economics, AFAIC, but it's alright, it's a better economics book than pretty much any text that is used in modern 'education' systems worldwide.
What makes you think that someone who extracts a short-term profit from buying and killing a business is acting in the interest of the market's long-term profit?
- it does NOT matter what the purpose is, as long as there is no government involvement, if the outcome of the business is a profit (which means that for example a company is bought and torn apart and sold off in pieces and this makes more money than it took to buy it), then more efficiency is created than existed while the business was operational.
This money that is extracted as profit is the reward that the fund gets for doing the job right and it's the money the fund can use for further investments, all of this is productive, even things people don't understand or appreciate, because superficially it looks like some form of destruction.
Do you know what happens to a corpse in nature? It gets eaten, it's taken apart and it's used by the remaining living creatures more efficiently, same exact principle.
If someone's labor is no longer needed, how do you expect him to feed himself?
- the same thing people have been doing when their particular buggy whip business was replaced with something more efficient - do something else.
We WANT all jobs that exist today to disappear, that's the entire purpose of everything that we actually do - destroy jobs while creating productivity that was impossible previously.
It used to be that over 90% of all people in existence on this planet had to be searching for food, gathering, farming, hunting, fishing, whatever. Today it's 5%. What are the remaining 95% doing? Did they die out? No, the population since then has increased a number of times, they are still doing something, it's just that they are doing something else, which is what we always want.
We always want to get rid of ALL existing jobs, so that all the things that are done with those jobs can be done without those jobs existing while people can start doing something else completely and we can't even predict what it is they will do, but it sure will be better if that happens.
Business is likewise fine if it's done voluntarily, otherwise it's theft.
- what does that mean?
. And in a lot of cases, such as state-enforced monopolies on last-mile utilities and some state-enforced monopolies on the spread of information, I do consider the exclusivity to be tantamount to theft.
- again, there shouldn't be any government in any business.
and after years of being a multi-millionaire without contributing anything to society
- wow. Just wow.
Without contributing anything to society. I mean, I don't own any Apple products, but this is not even about Steve Jobs, it's about the notion that a person who builds a successful business doesn't contribute anything to society.
In my, NOT so humble opinion, the person who builds a successful business contributes more to society than most charities and than any government. AFAIC the person who builds a successful business contributes more than 1000 times his fair share before he even pays a single cent in taxes.
The person who builds a successful business (especially if the industry is mostly unregulated, so it's the freest market available) by definition provides products and services that the people want.
The business provides products and services that the market desires at prices that are acceptable, because the market buys them.
Secondary to that (really secondary, it's not important at all, but it does exist) the business hires people, who now have jobs. These people unfortunately pay taxes, so gov't obviously gets way more than it deserves by this very fact.
OTOH a successful business is often something other people can invest in and make money for themselves, thus ensuring their own well being, which is again, something that society should desire - people who don't need to be supported, that can support themselves.
By definition the person who builds a successful business somehow is involved in some form of production (even if the business is an equity fund, whose entire job is to buy and tear down businesses, as long as there is profit at the end of this, it means that resources have been allocated more efficiently for purposes that are more useful to the market).
The products and services are often time and labour saving devices (or maybe they provide entertainment and leisure) and as such the products maybe can be used to free up more labour from being occupied in various jobs (yes, firing people is a very very good thing as long as the resources again, are allocate more efficiently, now these people do not need to do something that can be done automatically or maybe done differently altogether, as long as the market approves with profits, this means there is more efficient distribution of resources).
A person who builds his own business and does NOT do charity for the sake of charity but instead keeps doing what he is good at doing, is doing far more good in the economy and thus society, because he can use his own productivity (money) in a much more efficient way than any charity.
If charity is about saving some people, well, it should be up to individuals to do this if they want to, it must never be done by any government, because then it's not a charity, but a faceless entitlement system and wealth redistribution, which is immoral and should be made illegal (it is unconstitutional in USA at least anyway).
Charity is fine if it's done voluntarily, otherwise it's theft. A person who does business well, should be devoting most of his resources keeping at doing that business, not wasting resources on unrelated things (this includes taxes), that's how the society gets served the best.
False. That is precisely what I am arguing agaist, slavery. What I am promoting is the individual, rich or poor. How much for the left hemisphere of your brain? What you are failing to see is that your body, your arms and legs, and your organs are you.
- yes, it's me, and it is NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS what I do with every single part of myself. You want to tell me what I can and cannot do with own self, great, one more dictator on/.
Your argument is contradictory. If fairness is bullshit, then it matters not if we just take your organs and pay you what we want, if anything at all.
- fairness has nothing to do with rights and authorisations given to government. Fairness is a bullshit concept, it doesn't exist in the real world and whenever it is invoked, it means the exact opposite of what is fair.
Whenever anybody says: the rich should pay their 'fair share', they never mention what 'fair' means. To them it really means MORE than the rest, that's all. The rich are already paying more than the rest, they pay more than the rest before they pay a single cent of their own taxes, because their money is used to create the products and services everybody uses.
The Constitution is not about fairness, neither is the bill of rights. They are about freedoms and they specify that freedoms belong to individuals by default and that government has some authority under some circumstances to take away some of these freedoms, and ONLY THEN it says: fair trial.
And fair trial has a real definition there - trial in front of a judge and jury guided by law, not by personal dispositions.
What is fair? Is it fair that you want to deny a person to do whatever he wants with his own body? Is it fair that you want to deny a person the right to their own property, which STARTS with their own body?
Under the guise of fairness what you are promoting is total control over individuals, starting with total control of their own primal property - their bodies.
The problem is that human organs are not a normal commidity. Money doesn't and shouldn't give you the right to someone's organs. Money doesn't make you more deserving of the right to live any more than money makes you more deserving of death.
- deserving, nondeserving, save the fairness bullshit.
Either your body is your property or it is not. Are you for the government waging the war on drugs? Well, I am not, I am of an opinion that my own property starts with my own body, and I am free to do whatever I wish with it, regardless of you or anybody else's positions and objections.
Money is also just property, and property exchange among willing participants is not something government should be allowed to meddle with. It's the right to your life, liberty, pursuit of happiness (property).
Government shouldn't be able to deny any person right to life, liberty and property, and this means ability of the individual to do with as he or she pleases with his life, liberty and property also.
Funny how vast amounts of research, including ground-breaking research that ultimately finds its way into consumer products, is done by researchers using grant money from the government.
- no, it's not funny, it's terrifying to think how much money is stolen from the private sector and diverted to government that even such inefficient and broken system can sometimes produce something that ends up being used later on.
It's horrifying to think how much money is wasted, money that could have been used much more productively in the private sector, because in private sector people live by the rule of survival of the fittest ideas.
By the way, the long term research is also done by private companies, and the reason there is less of it is only because of how much money is STOLEN from the private sector and funnelled into government.
No, I am of the opinion that the R&D costs associated with drug research are high, that the risks are high, and that the combination of risks and costs requires pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices to remain profitable.
- nonsense, pure unadulterated nonsense. The reason that pharma companies raise their prices is that they are given a real monopoly status by the gov't. That's what the problem is with all the regulations, laws, tax code and patents around this issue.
There is NOTHING fundamentally different in researching a drug from any other type of business, and the microprocessor and car and other type of complex machine manufacturers prove you to be wrong. The chemical companies prove you to be wrong. Energy companies prove you to be wrong. Even cruise-line companies prove you to be wrong.
There is no reason in this world that the research today cannot be done CHEAPER than it was even 10 years ago, given the constant advancements in various technologies.
Same with every other area, where gov't is manipulating the market, from education to investment.
FDA must be defunded, there is absolutely NO reason for government to be approving or disapproving of ANY product on the market at all.
OK, let's defund the military
- 100%. Bring all troops home and shut down every military base in the world, I absolutely agree.
stop the war on drugs
- 100%. AFAIC gov't has no business AT ALL telling people what drugs they can and cannot take, be it heroine or Advil.
instead of pretending that the free market will solve all of our problems, let's use that money to pay for better schools
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to run schools.
better transportation
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to run transportation.
increased research
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to run research.
other public benefits
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to do anything like that.
There is one purpose for gov't: protection of freedoms of individuals. There is no other reason to have a government, and any gov't involvement in any other area of life should be dismantled.
- sure, I absolutely 100% agree with that. Not because it's about healthcare, but because government shouldn't be allowed to create and maintain monopolies, to give unfair codified advantages to some people over others, that's the only reason.
Let the scientists at universities develop new drugs, and let anyone who wants to produce them do so. If private companies want to compete with that, they are free to try.
- fine, as long as the universities are NOT publicly funded doesn't bother me.
The rest of your comment is complete nonsense, you are doubling down on a completely broken premise that government should be running any program or any type of business at all. You are of an opinion that the free market is unable to create competition and thus profit motive for people to invest their own time and resources into coming up with different solutions for health problems. As if people are unwilling to make money where there is money to be made.
The problem is the government, the problem is patents, copyrights, but the problem is also FDA, any type of gov't involvement in health care, health insurance, tax code, income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, money printing, all of this is what creates poverty, destroys competition, moves savings and thus investments somewhere else.
If you have gov't involved in anything, you get higher prices, less competition, more controls, lower quality, fewer choices in that area. This should be obvious by now.
What does it mean they 'deserve payment'? Does it mean that government should have authorisation to threaten violence to people who do not pay the musician if they listen to the product or redistribute it?
The gov't must NEVER be allowed to meddle in business, including setting up such scams as copyrights, patents and even limited liability corporations. But gov't also must not be allowed to dictate to individuals how they can do business, gov't must not be allowed to steal property via 'income' taxes or any other form of taxes where it's not a commercial transaction that is taxed or regulated, but instead the business itself is regulated.
By the way, the federal gov't in USA is authorised to 'regulate interstate commerce', but it absolutely does not mean that the gov't is authorised to regulate BUSINESS ITSELF.
Commerce is the act of selling and buying something (interstate, meaning - across state lines, the intent was to increase competition by preventing collusion). Instead the SCOTUS was placed into position that absolutely went above and beyond the real meaning of the Constitution and gave gov't justification to meddle with the business itself (thus all the illegal stuff, like minimum wage and other labour related laws, business regulations that have nothing to do with the actual interstate commerce itself, etc.)
What are you, deaf, blind and stupid? First of all, this is my comment, so is this. I've been talking about abolishing copyrights and patents before you were born by the way.
Secondly, the comment I am replying to has this in it:
Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large. Why should pharmaceutical companies get to extort money from people who desperately need medicines, and deny medicines to entire regions that are plagued by disease?
So the OBVIOUS question is: what does it mean, that "drug research should be publicly funded for the benefit of the public".
Does it imply that there shouldn't be any private research and does it mean that the commenter is against people searching for cures and drugs on their own time with their own money?
Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large. Why should pharmaceutical companies get to extort money from people who desperately need medicines,
- that's so stupid.
What are you going to do? Outlaw private funding into medical research? Outlaw results of such private research from being used to make money on the drug market?
The problem is exactly what you propose as a solution - government IN research with its patents and FDA and various subsidies, and you want to solve that problem... wait for it.... with more government.
People must realise that partially these problems come from allowing government to regulate business activity.
Once government gets involved and creates these fake 'rights' (women's rights, gay rights, worker rights, consumer rights) - concepts that make absolutely no sense in context of what a 'right' is (ability of an individual not to be abused by the collective - government), then you have this problem propagate itself further away from its 'intended' consequence.
Once the government says: you have a special right (a privilege by the way, not a right, because there is another individual that has an obligation put upon him for this to work) to sue somebody not because of any specific harm done that is criminal in nature, but because the government set up a series of rules that now can be violated and better yet, can be used to sue somebody doing business just because they do business in a manner that government doesn't approve of. Well, once the precedent is in, an ecology and economy starts building around it.
It is profitable to be a lawyer in a society that creates nothing but laws.
Of-course it is an economic problem, but think about this: in the former USSR people were quite poor really, and they still had 9-5 or whatever type of jobs, in most cases both parents worked as well and kids were spending plenty of time outside of the house and outside of schools too, majority of parents probably didn't know what their kids were up to at any given point in time.
What is different about USA is that it USED to be a productive and a wealthy country and you can trace most of the changes for the worse to government spending and borrowing and creating debts and eventually printing the dollar. You can trace the beginning of the real decline in USA economy and society to around 1971, which was the time Nixon took USA off the gold standard. This happened because more and more people asked to have their US dollars redeemed for gold, because of the fear that USA couldn't make good on all of its debt, and this was a default on the dollar in 1971, and this marked the time for the savers and investors and manufacturers that their capital became evaporating due to the high level of inflation (gov't printing money).
By the way, the major dictionaries redefined what inflation meant within the last 30 years as well. Inflation was simply defined as expansion of the monetary supply, now many dictionaries define it as rising prices. For the gov't it's very easy to keep certain indexes below pre-engineered thresholds in order to make it look like there is no inflation, but the former (real) definition wouldn't have allowed the gov't to pretend there is no inflation.
The savings and investments and all types of capital leave high inflation areas for lower inflation places, and the jobs follow. Eventually the society decays, as it doesn't produce anything but keeps living off of production of others. This can continue as long as others are willing to accept fake pieces of paper for their manufactured goods.
The current generation is eating up the goodwill and faith, that previous generations have built up
- by the way, here is something that you may consider: the previous generations have eaten the economic prosperity of the current ones.
The so called 'social contract' and the socialist/fascist system that USA voted itself into for the last 100 years starting with the traitor of the Republic Theodore Roosevelt and continuing with the rest of them, this is what allowed the previous generations to steal wealth that was built in the nineteenth century, mostly before 1913 and spend that, and then get into debts that the current generations are really stuck with.
This decade will be the decade of the fall of the US dollar, fall of the Euro, fall of the concept of 'social contract' and ever greater rise of the economies that actually produce stuff and those who export energy, raw materials and agriculture products.
China is already the dominant economy in the world today and it will only strengthen that position. Given what the choices are in USA and Europe for the leaders and given the fact what the understanding of economics and history is among the general population, USA and Europe will only be sliding further into poverty.
Right, they bought the cards, but they knew what they were buying and the company sells what it sells. You want the company to sell something different and you think there is money in it?
The company doesn't care what OS you are running, but it knows that it must provide good support for the most common types of OS in existence - various Windows platforms, all other platforms are probably irrelevant in terms of total market share, so the company doesn't cater to those specific types of customers that much.
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Done "correctly," HFC is bad for society because, like insider trading done "correctly," it specifically screws the "have nots" to benefit the "haves."
-
1. The only TRUE insiders are all in government and they CAN trade on their insider information. Gov't makes the rules, so when a congressman trades something with prior knowledge of the new law, or if somebody in FDA knows the outcome of a drug testing and then they trade on it, etc., that's real insider trading. All other trading done by individuals that run companies is not the same thing, they don't make the law.
2. For some reason you think that it is wrong that 'haves' are benefited while 'have nots' are not. Yes, a person who owns a HFT server is in a better position than a person that is not.
That is not a problem, it is no more a problem than a person who owns an excavator is a problem, because there are many people who dig with shovels.
Here is the real problem: gov't insider trading and gov't meddling with the economy, so that there is less actual economic activity and a huge proportion of 'economic' activity is moved to a trading floor.
In truth it it is just a mechanism to suck wealth away from those who actually create it
- says you.
"In truth" - 2 funny words. Where did you get that truth, at the bottom of your coffee mug?
Stock market trading is about most efficient distribution of resources, the problem is not with HFT, they MAY or MAY NOT be a problem, but the real problem is that the gov't protects monopolies and prevents people from doing business the way they want to.
I am sure we'd see tens or hundreds or thousands more of various types of stock exchanges open within a year if there were no government laws that protect monopolies that are in existence today (all of the laws regarding securities exchange, all of the Patriot Act and money laundering nonsense, etc.etc., all of this prevents people from running their own stock exchange companies and protects existing large corporations).
Maybe there is a market for a stock exchange company that would only trade certain types of stock with specific limits imposed upon trading speeds. If there is a market for it, it would be formed, somebody would start that business and would make a profit in it thus finding out that it indeed was a good business idea.
Nobody can truly know whether HFT is good or bad, nobody can truly know what exactly should be the limits on trading and whether there should be limits. But we do know that we cannot find out answers to these questions because of the way the government is involved in all of the money changing operations and thus it prevents market from figuring out these very interesting questions.
They can be seduced, confused, mislead, or pressured into a sub-optimal buying decision.
- that's always the case and with more power stolen by the government those people end up in government, doing much more damage than they could ever do in the private sector under free market, because government has power that no private sector entity has - threat of violence, which is unfortunately legal (or perceived as legal). This means that a con artist in the private sector will be discovered and then the con will stop, the people do not have to give him their money.
In gov't the con goes on forever because it's the law. Thus Madoff is in jail and his operation is shut down, but most importantly people wouldn't give him their money willingly anymore, but the Federal reserve, SS, Medicare, wars, all of this continues (and Bernanke is still the chairman of the Fed, it's not about the chairman of-course in gov't, it's about the position itself).
When marketing misleads, seduces, or pressures people into buying a sub-optimal choice, that reduces productivity.
- this is a non-issue, this is not a problem that should ever have gov't involvement anyway. Yes, there are con artists and yes the marketing is about telling you things you want to hear.
That's why in free market your good name is important, your brand is important, you want to maintain a good name and a good brand, because information travels fast, especially the more evolved the means of communications are.
By the way, when Apple sells something at a premium, it DOES NOT LIE. It sells the name, the brand, people want to buy into it, it's their business. Nobody should be standing in their path, telling them that they are stupid for buying into the brand while there are all these alternatives. They know about the alternatives, they don't care, because they want that brand.
It is not a problem at all that somebody pays Apple more than they would have paid Samsung for example, this is what the free market does - it sends signals to other people in the market that there are MORE PROFITS that can be made and so more competition is created.
A company that is very successful is its own destructive force, it will destroy its very successful business model, because as long as it can get all these premiums, there will be competitors who will want part of that action, and the bigger the success story is, the more competition will want a piece of that pie.
Government stands in the way of the competition though, with all the patents and copyrights, all the ways that a company like Apple can sue another company, a competitor, only because the government creates that environment, where suing somebody over patents and copyrights is possible and that's what a SMART company would do in this rigged market (rigged, because of patents and copyrights). It makes absolute sense to fight competitors not only with good products but in court, because the government provides this ability.
And that's why you are full of shit, I didn't attack charity, I attacked the notion that business people "don't contribute to society" and that government stealing productivity of people to redistribute it in various way is charity, it's not.
First, it's not a utopia. Every business out there exists to provide the market with something market wants or needs and as long as it's not a government mandated need, and it is not a gov't subsidised business, it can only survive by satisfying the consumer demand, what else do you think people do at work? Do you think they are sitting there, figuring out ways NOT to satisfy consumer demand? How do you propose they SELL something to somebody without giving them something useful or needed?
Secondly, you are right, most people do not end up starting their own businesses, and that's fine, because unfortunately businesses cannot run without hiring outside workers, and thus the people who do not start their own businesses become those workers, and there is a market for their service, like for everything else.
A person who is working for somebody else is SELLING HIS SERVICE, and he competes with other people in trying to sell his service to employers.
I am pretty sure you didn't see me weeping about those people or Jobs, people die, what else is new?
By the way, figuring out what people want and then doing it is what the free market capitalism all about (free market, as in without gov't intervention). In capitalism the means of production are privately owned and in the free market the government is not allowed to meddle with individuals, businesses, labour, money, insurance, education, any of it. USA used to do it right, today unfortunately it's China that is doing it most right.
Do you think the Chinese people who start their own businesses (and somebody starts a business every day in China), do you think they have to invent a completely new paradigm? Do you think that it takes an inventor to start a new business, do you think it has to be a completely new, previously unknown idea?
Thinking that is the absolutely wrong way to look at it. It's not about inventing a never before seen product (like iPad for example), it's about taking an idea and implementing it, WHATEVER the idea is. If the people - customers end up paying for it and there is some profit generated, then it's likely a good idea, even if it is just a pop-corn stand on an intersection where there was no popcorn stand previously.
If all the jobs disappeared today, because all of them could be done automatically, would you say the economy got weaker? That's what Krugman would say, he'd immediately call for all governments of the world to hire all these unemployed people to do anything, anything at all - dig ditches and cover them back with dirt, anything, as long as they are doing some form of work.
Well why the fuck would we want that? That's the dumbest idea in the world - taking possibly productive individuals and handing them over to government, so they can draw a subsidy, while doing something completely worthless and unproductive.
People are productive, people become productive when they must.
The reason why immigrants start so many businesses is because they must - because they don't have a settled network, they can't and they don't expect somebody to help them much, so they try to figure out how to CREATE a business - open a shoe shining stand, a hot dog stand, a repair shop, start a delivery business, do whatever it takes, and if they are successful it means they have created value, created a service or a product that the market is willing to pay for with enough overhead that there is profit in it.
This is not a zero sum game, we don't take away from anybody by creating a successful business as long as it's not mandated by gov't, not protected by gov't, not regulated in order to create a monopoly, etc.
What do you expect people to do between their position being eliminated and such a "something else" being discovered?
- I expect them to BE the people that discover it. Nobody should wait for somebody else to 'discover' something to do. What we should all be doing - looking for something people want and then do it.
--
Patents, copyrights shouldn't exist, neither should any 'exclusive' public utility rights.
Just once, I read it this year and wrote a short review of it as well, It's not the best book by Rand, I liked Fountainhead more and it's definitely not the best book on economics, AFAIC, but it's alright, it's a better economics book than pretty much any text that is used in modern 'education' systems worldwide.
What makes you think that someone who extracts a short-term profit from buying and killing a business is acting in the interest of the market's long-term profit?
- it does NOT matter what the purpose is, as long as there is no government involvement, if the outcome of the business is a profit (which means that for example a company is bought and torn apart and sold off in pieces and this makes more money than it took to buy it), then more efficiency is created than existed while the business was operational.
This money that is extracted as profit is the reward that the fund gets for doing the job right and it's the money the fund can use for further investments, all of this is productive, even things people don't understand or appreciate, because superficially it looks like some form of destruction.
Do you know what happens to a corpse in nature? It gets eaten, it's taken apart and it's used by the remaining living creatures more efficiently, same exact principle.
If someone's labor is no longer needed, how do you expect him to feed himself?
- the same thing people have been doing when their particular buggy whip business was replaced with something more efficient - do something else.
We WANT all jobs that exist today to disappear, that's the entire purpose of everything that we actually do - destroy jobs while creating productivity that was impossible previously.
It used to be that over 90% of all people in existence on this planet had to be searching for food, gathering, farming, hunting, fishing, whatever. Today it's 5%. What are the remaining 95% doing? Did they die out? No, the population since then has increased a number of times, they are still doing something, it's just that they are doing something else, which is what we always want.
We always want to get rid of ALL existing jobs, so that all the things that are done with those jobs can be done without those jobs existing while people can start doing something else completely and we can't even predict what it is they will do, but it sure will be better if that happens.
Business is likewise fine if it's done voluntarily, otherwise it's theft.
- what does that mean?
. And in a lot of cases, such as state-enforced monopolies on last-mile utilities and some state-enforced monopolies on the spread of information, I do consider the exclusivity to be tantamount to theft.
- again, there shouldn't be any government in any business.
and after years of being a multi-millionaire without contributing anything to society
- wow. Just wow.
Without contributing anything to society. I mean, I don't own any Apple products, but this is not even about Steve Jobs, it's about the notion that a person who builds a successful business doesn't contribute anything to society.
In my, NOT so humble opinion, the person who builds a successful business contributes more to society than most charities and than any government. AFAIC the person who builds a successful business contributes more than 1000 times his fair share before he even pays a single cent in taxes.
The person who builds a successful business (especially if the industry is mostly unregulated, so it's the freest market available) by definition provides products and services that the people want.
The business provides products and services that the market desires at prices that are acceptable, because the market buys them.
Secondary to that (really secondary, it's not important at all, but it does exist) the business hires people, who now have jobs. These people unfortunately pay taxes, so gov't obviously gets way more than it deserves by this very fact.
OTOH a successful business is often something other people can invest in and make money for themselves, thus ensuring their own well being, which is again, something that society should desire - people who don't need to be supported, that can support themselves.
By definition the person who builds a successful business somehow is involved in some form of production (even if the business is an equity fund, whose entire job is to buy and tear down businesses, as long as there is profit at the end of this, it means that resources have been allocated more efficiently for purposes that are more useful to the market).
The products and services are often time and labour saving devices (or maybe they provide entertainment and leisure) and as such the products maybe can be used to free up more labour from being occupied in various jobs (yes, firing people is a very very good thing as long as the resources again, are allocate more efficiently, now these people do not need to do something that can be done automatically or maybe done differently altogether, as long as the market approves with profits, this means there is more efficient distribution of resources).
A person who builds his own business and does NOT do charity for the sake of charity but instead keeps doing what he is good at doing, is doing far more good in the economy and thus society, because he can use his own productivity (money) in a much more efficient way than any charity.
If charity is about saving some people, well, it should be up to individuals to do this if they want to, it must never be done by any government, because then it's not a charity, but a faceless entitlement system and wealth redistribution, which is immoral and should be made illegal (it is unconstitutional in USA at least anyway).
Charity is fine if it's done voluntarily, otherwise it's theft. A person who does business well, should be devoting most of his resources keeping at doing that business, not wasting resources on unrelated things (this includes taxes), that's how the society gets served the best.
False. That is precisely what I am arguing agaist, slavery. What I am promoting is the individual, rich or poor. How much for the left hemisphere of your brain? What you are failing to see is that your body, your arms and legs, and your organs are you.
- yes, it's me, and it is NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS what I do with every single part of myself. You want to tell me what I can and cannot do with own self, great, one more dictator on /.
Your argument is contradictory. If fairness is bullshit, then it matters not if we just take your organs and pay you what we want, if anything at all.
- fairness has nothing to do with rights and authorisations given to government. Fairness is a bullshit concept, it doesn't exist in the real world and whenever it is invoked, it means the exact opposite of what is fair.
Whenever anybody says: the rich should pay their 'fair share', they never mention what 'fair' means. To them it really means MORE than the rest, that's all. The rich are already paying more than the rest, they pay more than the rest before they pay a single cent of their own taxes, because their money is used to create the products and services everybody uses.
The Constitution is not about fairness, neither is the bill of rights. They are about freedoms and they specify that freedoms belong to individuals by default and that government has some authority under some circumstances to take away some of these freedoms, and ONLY THEN it says: fair trial.
And fair trial has a real definition there - trial in front of a judge and jury guided by law, not by personal dispositions.
What is fair? Is it fair that you want to deny a person to do whatever he wants with his own body? Is it fair that you want to deny a person the right to their own property, which STARTS with their own body?
Under the guise of fairness what you are promoting is total control over individuals, starting with total control of their own primal property - their bodies.
The problem is that human organs are not a normal commidity. Money doesn't and shouldn't give you the right to someone's organs. Money doesn't make you more deserving of the right to live any more than money makes you more deserving of death.
- deserving, nondeserving, save the fairness bullshit.
Either your body is your property or it is not. Are you for the government waging the war on drugs? Well, I am not, I am of an opinion that my own property starts with my own body, and I am free to do whatever I wish with it, regardless of you or anybody else's positions and objections.
Money is also just property, and property exchange among willing participants is not something government should be allowed to meddle with. It's the right to your life, liberty, pursuit of happiness (property).
Government shouldn't be able to deny any person right to life, liberty and property, and this means ability of the individual to do with as he or she pleases with his life, liberty and property also.
Funny how vast amounts of research, including ground-breaking research that ultimately finds its way into consumer products, is done by researchers using grant money from the government.
- no, it's not funny, it's terrifying to think how much money is stolen from the private sector and diverted to government that even such inefficient and broken system can sometimes produce something that ends up being used later on.
It's horrifying to think how much money is wasted, money that could have been used much more productively in the private sector, because in private sector people live by the rule of survival of the fittest ideas.
By the way, the long term research is also done by private companies, and the reason there is less of it is only because of how much money is STOLEN from the private sector and funnelled into government.
No, I am of the opinion that the R&D costs associated with drug research are high, that the risks are high, and that the combination of risks and costs requires pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices to remain profitable.
- nonsense, pure unadulterated nonsense. The reason that pharma companies raise their prices is that they are given a real monopoly status by the gov't. That's what the problem is with all the regulations, laws, tax code and patents around this issue.
There is NOTHING fundamentally different in researching a drug from any other type of business, and the microprocessor and car and other type of complex machine manufacturers prove you to be wrong. The chemical companies prove you to be wrong. Energy companies prove you to be wrong. Even cruise-line companies prove you to be wrong.
There is no reason in this world that the research today cannot be done CHEAPER than it was even 10 years ago, given the constant advancements in various technologies.
Same with every other area, where gov't is manipulating the market, from education to investment.
FDA must be defunded, there is absolutely NO reason for government to be approving or disapproving of ANY product on the market at all.
OK, let's defund the military
- 100%. Bring all troops home and shut down every military base in the world, I absolutely agree.
stop the war on drugs
- 100%. AFAIC gov't has no business AT ALL telling people what drugs they can and cannot take, be it heroine or Advil.
instead of pretending that the free market will solve all of our problems, let's use that money to pay for better schools
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to run schools.
better transportation
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to run transportation.
increased research
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to run research.
other public benefits
- nonsense. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to do anything like that.
There is one purpose for gov't: protection of freedoms of individuals. There is no other reason to have a government, and any gov't involvement in any other area of life should be dismantled.
No, I rather see the end of patents on drugs,
- sure, I absolutely 100% agree with that. Not because it's about healthcare, but because government shouldn't be allowed to create and maintain monopolies, to give unfair codified advantages to some people over others, that's the only reason.
Let the scientists at universities develop new drugs, and let anyone who wants to produce them do so. If private companies want to compete with that, they are free to try.
- fine, as long as the universities are NOT publicly funded doesn't bother me.
The rest of your comment is complete nonsense, you are doubling down on a completely broken premise that government should be running any program or any type of business at all. You are of an opinion that the free market is unable to create competition and thus profit motive for people to invest their own time and resources into coming up with different solutions for health problems. As if people are unwilling to make money where there is money to be made.
The problem is the government, the problem is patents, copyrights, but the problem is also FDA, any type of gov't involvement in health care, health insurance, tax code, income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, money printing, all of this is what creates poverty, destroys competition, moves savings and thus investments somewhere else.
If you have gov't involved in anything, you get higher prices, less competition, more controls, lower quality, fewer choices in that area. This should be obvious by now.
No. A coder is paid up front.
- says who?
By the way, this:
Musicians deserve payment.
- says who?
What does it mean they 'deserve payment'? Does it mean that government should have authorisation to threaten violence to people who do not pay the musician if they listen to the product or redistribute it?
The gov't must NEVER be allowed to meddle in business, including setting up such scams as copyrights, patents and even limited liability corporations. But gov't also must not be allowed to dictate to individuals how they can do business, gov't must not be allowed to steal property via 'income' taxes or any other form of taxes where it's not a commercial transaction that is taxed or regulated, but instead the business itself is regulated.
By the way, the federal gov't in USA is authorised to 'regulate interstate commerce', but it absolutely does not mean that the gov't is authorised to regulate BUSINESS ITSELF.
Commerce is the act of selling and buying something (interstate, meaning - across state lines, the intent was to increase competition by preventing collusion). Instead the SCOTUS was placed into position that absolutely went above and beyond the real meaning of the Constitution and gave gov't justification to meddle with the business itself (thus all the illegal stuff, like minimum wage and other labour related laws, business regulations that have nothing to do with the actual interstate commerce itself, etc.)
What are you, deaf, blind and stupid? First of all, this is my comment, so is this. I've been talking about abolishing copyrights and patents before you were born by the way.
Secondly, the comment I am replying to has this in it:
Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large. Why should pharmaceutical companies get to extort money from people who desperately need medicines, and deny medicines to entire regions that are plagued by disease?
So the OBVIOUS question is: what does it mean, that "drug research should be publicly funded for the benefit of the public".
Does it imply that there shouldn't be any private research and does it mean that the commenter is against people searching for cures and drugs on their own time with their own money?
See how dumb you are?
Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large. Why should pharmaceutical companies get to extort money from people who desperately need medicines,
- that's so stupid.
What are you going to do? Outlaw private funding into medical research? Outlaw results of such private research from being used to make money on the drug market?
The problem is exactly what you propose as a solution - government IN research with its patents and FDA and various subsidies, and you want to solve that problem ... wait for it .... with more government.
Are you a government employee?
People must realise that partially these problems come from allowing government to regulate business activity.
Once government gets involved and creates these fake 'rights' (women's rights, gay rights, worker rights, consumer rights) - concepts that make absolutely no sense in context of what a 'right' is (ability of an individual not to be abused by the collective - government), then you have this problem propagate itself further away from its 'intended' consequence.
Once the government says: you have a special right (a privilege by the way, not a right, because there is another individual that has an obligation put upon him for this to work) to sue somebody not because of any specific harm done that is criminal in nature, but because the government set up a series of rules that now can be violated and better yet, can be used to sue somebody doing business just because they do business in a manner that government doesn't approve of. Well, once the precedent is in, an ecology and economy starts building around it.
It is profitable to be a lawyer in a society that creates nothing but laws.
Of-course it is an economic problem, but think about this: in the former USSR people were quite poor really, and they still had 9-5 or whatever type of jobs, in most cases both parents worked as well and kids were spending plenty of time outside of the house and outside of schools too, majority of parents probably didn't know what their kids were up to at any given point in time.
What is different about USA is that it USED to be a productive and a wealthy country and you can trace most of the changes for the worse to government spending and borrowing and creating debts and eventually printing the dollar. You can trace the beginning of the real decline in USA economy and society to around 1971, which was the time Nixon took USA off the gold standard. This happened because more and more people asked to have their US dollars redeemed for gold, because of the fear that USA couldn't make good on all of its debt, and this was a default on the dollar in 1971, and this marked the time for the savers and investors and manufacturers that their capital became evaporating due to the high level of inflation (gov't printing money).
By the way, the major dictionaries redefined what inflation meant within the last 30 years as well. Inflation was simply defined as expansion of the monetary supply, now many dictionaries define it as rising prices. For the gov't it's very easy to keep certain indexes below pre-engineered thresholds in order to make it look like there is no inflation, but the former (real) definition wouldn't have allowed the gov't to pretend there is no inflation.
The savings and investments and all types of capital leave high inflation areas for lower inflation places, and the jobs follow. Eventually the society decays, as it doesn't produce anything but keeps living off of production of others. This can continue as long as others are willing to accept fake pieces of paper for their manufactured goods.
The current generation is eating up the goodwill and faith, that previous generations have built up
- by the way, here is something that you may consider: the previous generations have eaten the economic prosperity of the current ones.
The so called 'social contract' and the socialist/fascist system that USA voted itself into for the last 100 years starting with the traitor of the Republic Theodore Roosevelt and continuing with the rest of them, this is what allowed the previous generations to steal wealth that was built in the nineteenth century, mostly before 1913 and spend that, and then get into debts that the current generations are really stuck with.
Excellent, so do you agree then that all patents and copyrights must be abolished?
This decade will be the decade of the fall of the US dollar, fall of the Euro, fall of the concept of 'social contract' and ever greater rise of the economies that actually produce stuff and those who export energy, raw materials and agriculture products.
China is already the dominant economy in the world today and it will only strengthen that position. Given what the choices are in USA and Europe for the leaders and given the fact what the understanding of economics and history is among the general population, USA and Europe will only be sliding further into poverty.
Right, they bought the cards, but they knew what they were buying and the company sells what it sells. You want the company to sell something different and you think there is money in it?
The company doesn't care what OS you are running, but it knows that it must provide good support for the most common types of OS in existence - various Windows platforms, all other platforms are probably irrelevant in terms of total market share, so the company doesn't cater to those specific types of customers that much.