Here is an answer for you. In Baden Baden I was driving once with a stereo on very loud, a cop pulled up beside me and actually insisted I reduce the volume, because get this, he said it was illegal to have very loud and not to hear what's happening around.
I don't blame anything except for people. People are the root of everything. No system can withstand the will of people, and the will of people is always the same: take as much as possible, give nothing back. This works out to detriment of any ideology in the long run, that is exactly why any social system, no matter how great in the beginning will get corrupted. Any system gets corrupted over time due to people, and specifically people in power, and that means people in government and that is why I am always against any government, I see it as inherently corrupt.
I am quite certain that if a person is deaf and cannot use hearing aid to hear, he can't drive and there are good reasons for that, for once you can't hear any siren, be it a cop or a firetruck or an ambulance. You can't hear car horns, you can't hear any noise that you should hear on the road.
Bernie Madoff went to jail because it was his last option, he is hiding in jail, if he did not go, he wouldn't have been breathing by now, more importantly to him, neither would any of his close family.
Sure, as long as your government is not spending more than it takes in while doing ALL of that, as long as all the costs are covered without getting into debt, as long as nobody is working to undermine the system (which you know they are doing all the time), you can continue this way.
But if your costs are not covered and you have to borrow and/or print the difference (which is happening to most of the state governments right now) then you are living on borrowed time and once the financial problems start, you will lose all of these entitlements whether you want to or not, then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else, without money and way of supporting yourself, as everyone else and you will find out what it's like not just to compete for money, but for food and all that you need to survive. AFAIC everybody who is making only enough money to carry them through the month and not investing something, not saving something (in gold at this point preferably) is kidding themselves. They are all living on borrowed time.
- only initially when there are no commodities at all created around that market. Besides which, don't forget that all market were entered with at least some capital. As an example I already used the DC vs AC fight of Edison and Tesla. Edison had his money and Tesla had secured some backing from other sources.
The entire idea is that you try to get capital and there is risk involved for all parties - for the investors as well as for the entrepreneurs themselves. Risk taking is what sets people who do it aside from those who don't do it. Of-course when the governments get involved, the risk taking becomes a different kind - you socialize the risk and privatize the gain, yet another reason government should stay out of economics, it clearly does not understand what risk management and assumption is, it's not willing to let any monopoly it created fail. Huge profits happen precisely for the same reason - companies that get these profits use the money to set up a system of regulations through the governments by creating laws, that create the barriers of entry that make entry into the business expensive.
You think it does not happen that a bank or a hedge fund or an insurance company or a medical provider etc. uses their own behavior multiplied by the force of lobbying to create barriers of entry for smaller competitors? It happens all the time.
It takes time for a price/quality ratio to become such, that a competitor enters a difficult to enter monopoly space, but it happens eventually. An interesting example is Microsoft with its operating systems and other software and Free Software, which became a real competitor in those areas (and of-course Apple, partially based on BSD free software).
It is of-course difficult to lay down the lines of cable, but it is not an impossible task, otherwise it would not have been possible for any private enterprise to ever do this, and we know that it happened many times that private enterprise did it anyway. Example of it is the electrical wars between Edison and Tesla, one betting on DC and the other on AC currents. They had alternative ways of moving energy, the infrastructure requirements were very different.
Someone mentioned the water/electrical systems and how it is 'impossible to compete' in those areas, but that's just nonsense. Water is easily shown to be nonsense, look at the water industry with bottled water costing more than gasoline per volume unit, and it still sells. On the other hand we have improvements in technology, thus what used to require us laying cable, at this point is not really such a stone carved requirements, you don't see cables attached to everyone's smart-phones, and yet people use Internet on those.
Well no, in both cases Stalin and Hitler, the entire countries were swept off their feet with their leaders, they were exceptionally good at manipulating people. In fact a better thing for the world would have been death of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini much before they became known, it would have been easy to set as well, after all, if you are a time traveler you have what it seems like unlimited power. There were multiple points in history where it would have been very easy to change the course of the world. Even nuclear power itself could have been distributed much more evenly in the world, plans could have been provided to most countries at the same time, or the other way around - if enough key people are killed off, the nuclear power could have been prevented from being discovered.
In fact seeing how much imbalance exists in the world, especially related to military it is clear that the time machine does not exist ever in any time, because if it did exist and could have been used to change the past, many people would have changed the past to provide more balance to the world of military power, even if only based on allegiance to any one specific nation.
If you have a French man with a time machine and an Indian with a time machine, why wouldn't they have changed the past to make their countries more powerful by giving them more tools in the past to win in any conflict?
I did not say evil, I said amoral, which means it doesn't know about morals. Market is amoral in the sense that it does not care about outcomes for some specific groups of population based on something as relative and loosely defined as morals. Amoral does not mean market is bad, amoral means market cannot distinguish between good and bad in any context.
Natural monopolies, mostly utilities (such as an ISP)
- most monopolies are not natural, but government created, you'd have to work hard to find a natural monopoly except for DeBeers probably, and that is also questionable, just how 'natural' it is.
The freaking first monopoly that caused the entire anti-monopoly movement was an oil company, which by the time it was broken into pieces wasn't a monopoly anymore, had plenty of competition, but more importantly it was actually a monopoly for a while because it provided the correct price/quality ratio. There is nothing wrong with a 'natural' monopoly in a sub-sector of economy as long as the feedback mechanism (market) does not indicate that there is enough room for competition.
There are a few other cases of failures of a free market, but natural monopolies are the easiest to see.
- it is not a failure:) there is a reason a monopoly is 'natural' in the first place - you provide service to a set of customers so small, there is no room for more than one company or your prices/quality of service is just right and nobody can enter the market as long as this ratio stays right.
This is especially true with mandatory utilities, like water or electricity.
- a huge misunderstanding. There is nothing that makes water or electricity different from any other business. There were and are today in different parts of the world plenty of various water/electricity providers. It is possible to have competition, even today, just look at the bottled water.
Think about how much MORE bottled water costs than your tap water, it's INSANE! It's more expensive than many other valuable liquids, including gasoline.
And electricity? Think back to Edison vs Tesla: one pushing AC, the other DC. Completely different infrastructure requirements. Think about private electrical generators. Future of nuclear power miniaturization. There is always room for competition.
market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good
- disagree on your definition. It's not about 'good' vs 'bad', that's what causes people to misunderstand markets and to want more regulation. It is about what is balanced vs unbalanced. Free Market does not know 'good' and it does not know 'bad', it tends towards an optimum price/quality ratio through market feedback system that signals whether there is room for competition or not.
What governments and regulations do, is they break the business cycle of boom/bust, break something that in fact causes the market forces to be in balance. Government does not want the balance to be restored, it wants a perpetual boom and it never wants to see a bust, because bust means that there is a correction, businesses need to cut spending and government needs to cut spending, and where have you ever seen a government that actually wanted to cut spending and shrink? It does not exist, as do not exist people, who want to let go of power and money.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
- but it's not true, do you actually truly believe what you write here? There is no free market in banking, no more than in Telco or Oil business, no more than in other big businesses. Governments prefer monopolies because monopolies give them more money back, governments 'recycle' more money from monopolies than from cut-throat businesses that truly compete on cost, where do those competing businesses can get money from to give to governments? Monopolies are created by the governments, any big business today is fed and oiled by the government. Look at the banking industry - FDIC is a prime example of something that was government regulation aimed at fixing a non-issue that lead to a gigantic moral hazard and helped to create huge banking monopolies. FDIC was created after the great depression to fight a problem that only affected about 2% of banks - those banks lost the money and couldn't return it to customers, when in reality the problem was not about people not being able to get their paper money back, but about people having the money and not being able to buy things with them, because paper lost value. While creating FDIC for probably 'noble' reasons (in reality for reasons based on political expedience) the real effect of it became something more sinister: people now spend no time thinking about the bank they use, no more time than thinking about which TV they'll buy. Moral hazard for the customers and for the banks. Banks, who do not have to compete for customers based on their performance and sound business, those banks can become as reckless with money as they can get away with. This is not the only reason for huge banks running the government, many other reasons exist: like the entire idea that government pushes forward about living on debt and never really repaying it. Free money that government prints and gives to preferred corporations make monopolies, or do you believe otherwise? Military industrial complex and banks and insurance industries and colleges even, many businesses that get money directly (discount Fed window, military bills) or indirectly (government guaranteed loans, medicare), these businesses now do not have to compete for customers, and they can push the prices way too high, because government guarantees the money will be paid.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome,
- not really. Look at the competitors, while BP had maybe a thousand violations of various procedures over 10 years, the rest of the oil industry had hardly 50 combined. BP is a very special
I did not misunderstood what you are saying. Those who say 'free market' in situation like this are either mistaken, or they are lying, because there is no free market in this industry, which AFAIC is a mistake.
So I am PRO Free Market, and I see you writing a comment that is actually derogatory towards the idea of free market, because there is no way free market can easily fix a problem that was created artificially and not with market forces.
I see you as someone who wants the government to take care of this, I on the other hand would have preferred the free market, but it can't do magic, it can't fix something immediately that is this broken. My point is that people have been shouting 'free market' a lot when they are pointing at problems, when in reality those problems were caused by the exact opposite - not letting the free market work in the first place.
Once we are done laughing at the joke, let's try to be serious for a second.
Math is not science, it is an art form, parts of it are used in sciences because this is an art form that allows us to create a self-consistent limited set of rules within limits we define and then with those rules, within those limits we can simulate certain properties of physical events.
So a good response to something as silly as that would be that math is completely man-made and does not pretend to 'know the truth', it does not try to establish itself as a science that answers any questions, but it can be used to simulate parts of reality, thus it does not compete with any religion at all, so no worries for creationists there. Of-course I am not sure they can understand this point.
Why do you bring 'free market' into something that has no free market around it for a million miles?
Who built their own infrastructure without government's money? Who built their own infrastructure without various tax deals/breaks?
So if government gives money, where is 'free market' in that?
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If an ISP/Telco actually spent their own money to buy all of the necessary equipment and to pay all of the fees associated with laying all of the infrastructure themselves, then they should have all the rights to charge whatever they want for whatever service they like to deliver, and if this means they want to discriminate between packets on the networks, all they have to do is write it into the contract.
However if someone knows of a Telco/ISP that did that, paid for everything out of their own pocket, please step forward. Looks to me like there is no free market in this industry and never was, so why are you expecting Free Market to take care of this NOW?
Plenty to do with your post, there is no way that all of the bad things are the best that could have been. Here is an easy one: had someone gave some money to 'you know who' when he was still a relatively good painter in Austria, so that he could have continued with his schooling, he would have become a painter rather than becoming head of the German government in the thirties and starting the wars.
Because having a time machine that allows you to change things is too much of a temptation to keep using it for most people, and those who have agenda to 'fix' stuff would keep doing it. Nobody will invent a working useful time machine that allows changing the past.
Your point is that a country with a government that is supposedly implements regulations? What is that, some sort of a revelation for you?
- should have previewed, but whatever.
I mean to say your point is that a country with a supposedly working economy implements regulations and I am saying all of them are manipulating their economies and will lead to creating imbalances.
A better example is Hong-Kong, where the HK dollars are created by three separate banks, so while the city itself also prints money, they can't turn up the printers like US or others do because obviously, people would flock away whatever government dollars they have and move into more sound private money. They have very little regulations and their economy is much stronger than of most other nations. At least they are trying to do this the right way.
Anyway, at this point this conversation became useless, I already made my point.
Your point is that a country with a government that is supposedly implements regulations? What is that, some sort of a revelation for you?
My point is that all of them are destroying their economy in the process, and many countries have ceased to exist for this exact reason, if you don't understand that, you should look up a list of countries that just disappeared as countries only within the past 200 years, and I was born in one of them, it's not hard to find that example.
We are diametrically opposed to each others points of view, obviously, nothing to see here, move alone.
well, all you do is build a doomsday device and travel back and kill everybody who possibly could be used as your grandfather, like all men. Kill all men and see what happens. I guess you'd quickly find out that your grandfather was an ape.
I'll tell you this, based on your statement time travel to change anything is impossible, forbidden simply because so many bad things have happened in the past and we know that there are plenty of people who'd like to change that so it wouldn't have happened.
Since all of the murders and wars and accidents and illnesses happened that are in history books it means that nobody changed the flow of history in the past to prevent them and so time travel, at least with the objective of changing something is impossible.
So in your imaginary world, could I sell poisoned candy to children? How about poisoned woodchips for their playground? How about coal mining methods that poisoned the school water supply?
- you'd have to rethink that statement right now, because nothing STOPS you from doing that immediately, today, and it happens all the time. Just a while ago there was a melanin in baby formula sold, a bunch of kids died. Some poor schmuck got shot in China by the government for this, some driver, obviously not the person truly responsible. So that shows that with regulations and with corrupt government, you get the same thing happening and then punishment is doled out to people only marginally involved while the guilty parties go free.
Maybe you should go back to my comments and reread them, because you are obviously incapable of understanding what is written.
Government's role as a cop/jailer/minimum military is essential in 'my imaginary world', and it is the ONLY role that is required. Sell baby formula with melanin in it and cause some deaths? Here is a nice long sentence if not a death sentence and your assets are confiscated. We shouldn't let murderers go unpunished, or was I not clear on this fine point?
Violate your own best industry standards and cause a massive oil spill? OK, but now you are facing a class action lawsuit from the government on behalf of the people, who collectively own the ocean. So it should be - government's role as a system maintaining justice and ability to punish must be concentrated upon, while all other rules and regulations are business of the industries.
After all, you do understand that all safety and other regulations really come out of best industry practices, or do you believe that government is able to come up with the best ways of pumping oil out of the ocean safely? It can't even do one job right: make sure that its own employees are not already bought out by the industry and are literally and figuratively sleeping with it.
In the civilized world, regulations prevent things like these from ever being legal. They define weights and measures, test and certify building materials, and make sure that fly-by-night companies don't sell substandard products and take the profits to the Caribbean, leaving someone else to bear the cost of their negligence.
- this is what "the civilized" world likes to believe, but it does not make it true or right. What do government's officials understand about measurements? Nothing. They understand nothing about building materials or substandard products. All of this is about working competition. However government must make it a full time job - doling out justice and punishment to those, who abuse the trust. You build a house that collapses and kills people? Well, let's find out how you did such a wonderful job, if it can be shown that you did a substandard job and cut costs while not following the best standards of your industry - your company is dismantled, your profits are confiscated and you spend the rest of your life in jail. Sounds fine.
With your fascination with no regulations, you may have been at home in the Victorian era. Slavery, children as young as 4 working mills, mines, blacking factories, dying young from simple exposure to the chemicals they worked with. Child prostitution. Everyone else was working sixteen hours a day for little pay, getting dumped in a ditch if they were seriously injured on the job, people burning to death in locked buildings... and no government regulations to get in the way and slow down the economy. No annoying fire safety standards, housing standards, workplace safety standards...
- sounds dreamy. That is what capitalism and industrialization FIXED and that is what the government is going to CAUSE yet again, by killing an economy that was built by capitalism.
And, since you seem to be preoccupied with the red herring about fiat currency,
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Here is an answer for you. In Baden Baden I was driving once with a stereo on very loud, a cop pulled up beside me and actually insisted I reduce the volume, because get this, he said it was illegal to have very loud and not to hear what's happening around.
Depends on the place.
yes yes yes, five people already commented that I am totally wrong, that deaf people are allowed to drive legally in different places.
It does not it right, but it makes me wrong. Thank you, for being the person #5, I am sure more will comment.
I don't blame anything except for people. People are the root of everything. No system can withstand the will of people, and the will of people is always the same: take as much as possible, give nothing back. This works out to detriment of any ideology in the long run, that is exactly why any social system, no matter how great in the beginning will get corrupted. Any system gets corrupted over time due to people, and specifically people in power, and that means people in government and that is why I am always against any government, I see it as inherently corrupt.
I am quite certain that if a person is deaf and cannot use hearing aid to hear, he can't drive and there are good reasons for that, for once you can't hear any siren, be it a cop or a firetruck or an ambulance. You can't hear car horns, you can't hear any noise that you should hear on the road.
Bernie Madoff went to jail because it was his last option, he is hiding in jail, if he did not go, he wouldn't have been breathing by now, more importantly to him, neither would any of his close family.
Sure, as long as your government is not spending more than it takes in while doing ALL of that, as long as all the costs are covered without getting into debt, as long as nobody is working to undermine the system (which you know they are doing all the time), you can continue this way.
But if your costs are not covered and you have to borrow and/or print the difference (which is happening to most of the state governments right now) then you are living on borrowed time and once the financial problems start, you will lose all of these entitlements whether you want to or not, then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else, without money and way of supporting yourself, as everyone else and you will find out what it's like not just to compete for money, but for food and all that you need to survive. AFAIC everybody who is making only enough money to carry them through the month and not investing something, not saving something (in gold at this point preferably) is kidding themselves. They are all living on borrowed time.
it requires a low barrier to enter.
- only initially when there are no commodities at all created around that market. Besides which, don't forget that all market were entered with at least some capital. As an example I already used the DC vs AC fight of Edison and Tesla. Edison had his money and Tesla had secured some backing from other sources.
The entire idea is that you try to get capital and there is risk involved for all parties - for the investors as well as for the entrepreneurs themselves. Risk taking is what sets people who do it aside from those who don't do it. Of-course when the governments get involved, the risk taking becomes a different kind - you socialize the risk and privatize the gain, yet another reason government should stay out of economics, it clearly does not understand what risk management and assumption is, it's not willing to let any monopoly it created fail. Huge profits happen precisely for the same reason - companies that get these profits use the money to set up a system of regulations through the governments by creating laws, that create the barriers of entry that make entry into the business expensive.
You think it does not happen that a bank or a hedge fund or an insurance company or a medical provider etc. uses their own behavior multiplied by the force of lobbying to create barriers of entry for smaller competitors? It happens all the time.
It takes time for a price/quality ratio to become such, that a competitor enters a difficult to enter monopoly space, but it happens eventually. An interesting example is Microsoft with its operating systems and other software and Free Software, which became a real competitor in those areas (and of-course Apple, partially based on BSD free software).
It is of-course difficult to lay down the lines of cable, but it is not an impossible task, otherwise it would not have been possible for any private enterprise to ever do this, and we know that it happened many times that private enterprise did it anyway. Example of it is the electrical wars between Edison and Tesla, one betting on DC and the other on AC currents. They had alternative ways of moving energy, the infrastructure requirements were very different.
Someone mentioned the water/electrical systems and how it is 'impossible to compete' in those areas, but that's just nonsense. Water is easily shown to be nonsense, look at the water industry with bottled water costing more than gasoline per volume unit, and it still sells. On the other hand we have improvements in technology, thus what used to require us laying cable, at this point is not really such a stone carved requirements, you don't see cables attached to everyone's smart-phones, and yet people use Internet on those.
Well no, in both cases Stalin and Hitler, the entire countries were swept off their feet with their leaders, they were exceptionally good at manipulating people. In fact a better thing for the world would have been death of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini much before they became known, it would have been easy to set as well, after all, if you are a time traveler you have what it seems like unlimited power. There were multiple points in history where it would have been very easy to change the course of the world. Even nuclear power itself could have been distributed much more evenly in the world, plans could have been provided to most countries at the same time, or the other way around - if enough key people are killed off, the nuclear power could have been prevented from being discovered.
In fact seeing how much imbalance exists in the world, especially related to military it is clear that the time machine does not exist ever in any time, because if it did exist and could have been used to change the past, many people would have changed the past to provide more balance to the world of military power, even if only based on allegiance to any one specific nation.
If you have a French man with a time machine and an Indian with a time machine, why wouldn't they have changed the past to make their countries more powerful by giving them more tools in the past to win in any conflict?
I did not say evil, I said amoral, which means it doesn't know about morals. Market is amoral in the sense that it does not care about outcomes for some specific groups of population based on something as relative and loosely defined as morals. Amoral does not mean market is bad, amoral means market cannot distinguish between good and bad in any context.
Natural monopolies, mostly utilities (such as an ISP)
- most monopolies are not natural, but government created, you'd have to work hard to find a natural monopoly except for DeBeers probably, and that is also questionable, just how 'natural' it is.
The freaking first monopoly that caused the entire anti-monopoly movement was an oil company, which by the time it was broken into pieces wasn't a monopoly anymore, had plenty of competition, but more importantly it was actually a monopoly for a while because it provided the correct price/quality ratio. There is nothing wrong with a 'natural' monopoly in a sub-sector of economy as long as the feedback mechanism (market) does not indicate that there is enough room for competition.
There are a few other cases of failures of a free market, but natural monopolies are the easiest to see.
- it is not a failure :) there is a reason a monopoly is 'natural' in the first place - you provide service to a set of customers so small, there is no room for more than one company or your prices/quality of service is just right and nobody can enter the market as long as this ratio stays right.
This is especially true with mandatory utilities, like water or electricity.
- a huge misunderstanding. There is nothing that makes water or electricity different from any other business. There were and are today in different parts of the world plenty of various water/electricity providers. It is possible to have competition, even today, just look at the bottled water.
Think about how much MORE bottled water costs than your tap water, it's INSANE! It's more expensive than many other valuable liquids, including gasoline.
And electricity? Think back to Edison vs Tesla: one pushing AC, the other DC. Completely different infrastructure requirements. Think about private electrical generators. Future of nuclear power miniaturization. There is always room for competition.
market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good
- disagree on your definition. It's not about 'good' vs 'bad', that's what causes people to misunderstand markets and to want more regulation. It is about what is balanced vs unbalanced. Free Market does not know 'good' and it does not know 'bad', it tends towards an optimum price/quality ratio through market feedback system that signals whether there is room for competition or not.
What governments and regulations do, is they break the business cycle of boom/bust, break something that in fact causes the market forces to be in balance. Government does not want the balance to be restored, it wants a perpetual boom and it never wants to see a bust, because bust means that there is a correction, businesses need to cut spending and government needs to cut spending, and where have you ever seen a government that actually wanted to cut spending and shrink? It does not exist, as do not exist people, who want to let go of power and money.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
- but it's not true, do you actually truly believe what you write here? There is no free market in banking, no more than in Telco or Oil business, no more than in other big businesses. Governments prefer monopolies because monopolies give them more money back, governments 'recycle' more money from monopolies than from cut-throat businesses that truly compete on cost, where do those competing businesses can get money from to give to governments? Monopolies are created by the governments, any big business today is fed and oiled by the government. Look at the banking industry - FDIC is a prime example of something that was government regulation aimed at fixing a non-issue that lead to a gigantic moral hazard and helped to create huge banking monopolies. FDIC was created after the great depression to fight a problem that only affected about 2% of banks - those banks lost the money and couldn't return it to customers, when in reality the problem was not about people not being able to get their paper money back, but about people having the money and not being able to buy things with them, because paper lost value. While creating FDIC for probably 'noble' reasons (in reality for reasons based on political expedience) the real effect of it became something more sinister: people now spend no time thinking about the bank they use, no more time than thinking about which TV they'll buy. Moral hazard for the customers and for the banks. Banks, who do not have to compete for customers based on their performance and sound business, those banks can become as reckless with money as they can get away with. This is not the only reason for huge banks running the government, many other reasons exist: like the entire idea that government pushes forward about living on debt and never really repaying it. Free money that government prints and gives to preferred corporations make monopolies, or do you believe otherwise? Military industrial complex and banks and insurance industries and colleges even, many businesses that get money directly (discount Fed window, military bills) or indirectly (government guaranteed loans, medicare), these businesses now do not have to compete for customers, and they can push the prices way too high, because government guarantees the money will be paid.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome,
- not really. Look at the competitors, while BP had maybe a thousand violations of various procedures over 10 years, the rest of the oil industry had hardly 50 combined. BP is a very special
Oh, and excuse my first sentence, all of the tenses in it are totally mixed up.
I did not misunderstood what you are saying. Those who say 'free market' in situation like this are either mistaken, or they are lying, because there is no free market in this industry, which AFAIC is a mistake.
So I am PRO Free Market, and I see you writing a comment that is actually derogatory towards the idea of free market, because there is no way free market can easily fix a problem that was created artificially and not with market forces.
I see you as someone who wants the government to take care of this, I on the other hand would have preferred the free market, but it can't do magic, it can't fix something immediately that is this broken. My point is that people have been shouting 'free market' a lot when they are pointing at problems, when in reality those problems were caused by the exact opposite - not letting the free market work in the first place.
Once we are done laughing at the joke, let's try to be serious for a second.
Math is not science, it is an art form, parts of it are used in sciences because this is an art form that allows us to create a self-consistent limited set of rules within limits we define and then with those rules, within those limits we can simulate certain properties of physical events.
So a good response to something as silly as that would be that math is completely man-made and does not pretend to 'know the truth', it does not try to establish itself as a science that answers any questions, but it can be used to simulate parts of reality, thus it does not compete with any religion at all, so no worries for creationists there. Of-course I am not sure they can understand this point.
Why do you bring 'free market' into something that has no free market around it for a million miles?
Who built their own infrastructure without government's money? Who built their own infrastructure without various tax deals/breaks?
So if government gives money, where is 'free market' in that?
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If an ISP/Telco actually spent their own money to buy all of the necessary equipment and to pay all of the fees associated with laying all of the infrastructure themselves, then they should have all the rights to charge whatever they want for whatever service they like to deliver, and if this means they want to discriminate between packets on the networks, all they have to do is write it into the contract.
However if someone knows of a Telco/ISP that did that, paid for everything out of their own pocket, please step forward. Looks to me like there is no free market in this industry and never was, so why are you expecting Free Market to take care of this NOW?
Plenty to do with your post, there is no way that all of the bad things are the best that could have been. Here is an easy one: had someone gave some money to 'you know who' when he was still a relatively good painter in Austria, so that he could have continued with his schooling, he would have become a painter rather than becoming head of the German government in the thirties and starting the wars.
Because having a time machine that allows you to change things is too much of a temptation to keep using it for most people, and those who have agenda to 'fix' stuff would keep doing it. Nobody will invent a working useful time machine that allows changing the past.
Your point is that a country with a government that is supposedly implements regulations? What is that, some sort of a revelation for you?
- should have previewed, but whatever.
I mean to say your point is that a country with a supposedly working economy implements regulations and I am saying all of them are manipulating their economies and will lead to creating imbalances.
A better example is Hong-Kong, where the HK dollars are created by three separate banks, so while the city itself also prints money, they can't turn up the printers like US or others do because obviously, people would flock away whatever government dollars they have and move into more sound private money. They have very little regulations and their economy is much stronger than of most other nations. At least they are trying to do this the right way.
Anyway, at this point this conversation became useless, I already made my point.
Your point is that a country with a government that is supposedly implements regulations? What is that, some sort of a revelation for you?
My point is that all of them are destroying their economy in the process, and many countries have ceased to exist for this exact reason, if you don't understand that, you should look up a list of countries that just disappeared as countries only within the past 200 years, and I was born in one of them, it's not hard to find that example.
We are diametrically opposed to each others points of view, obviously, nothing to see here, move alone.
well, all you do is build a doomsday device and travel back and kill everybody who possibly could be used as your grandfather, like all men. Kill all men and see what happens. I guess you'd quickly find out that your grandfather was an ape.
I'll tell you this, based on your statement time travel to change anything is impossible, forbidden simply because so many bad things have happened in the past and we know that there are plenty of people who'd like to change that so it wouldn't have happened.
Since all of the murders and wars and accidents and illnesses happened that are in history books it means that nobody changed the flow of history in the past to prevent them and so time travel, at least with the objective of changing something is impossible.
well, if you don't it means you shouldn't. In case you care to find out, here it is.
So in your imaginary world, could I sell poisoned candy to children? How about poisoned woodchips for their playground? How about coal mining methods that poisoned the school water supply?
- you'd have to rethink that statement right now, because nothing STOPS you from doing that immediately, today, and it happens all the time. Just a while ago there was a melanin in baby formula sold, a bunch of kids died. Some poor schmuck got shot in China by the government for this, some driver, obviously not the person truly responsible. So that shows that with regulations and with corrupt government, you get the same thing happening and then punishment is doled out to people only marginally involved while the guilty parties go free.
Maybe you should go back to my comments and reread them, because you are obviously incapable of understanding what is written.
Government's role as a cop/jailer/minimum military is essential in 'my imaginary world', and it is the ONLY role that is required. Sell baby formula with melanin in it and cause some deaths? Here is a nice long sentence if not a death sentence and your assets are confiscated. We shouldn't let murderers go unpunished, or was I not clear on this fine point?
Violate your own best industry standards and cause a massive oil spill? OK, but now you are facing a class action lawsuit from the government on behalf of the people, who collectively own the ocean. So it should be - government's role as a system maintaining justice and ability to punish must be concentrated upon, while all other rules and regulations are business of the industries.
After all, you do understand that all safety and other regulations really come out of best industry practices, or do you believe that government is able to come up with the best ways of pumping oil out of the ocean safely? It can't even do one job right: make sure that its own employees are not already bought out by the industry and are literally and figuratively sleeping with it.
In the civilized world, regulations prevent things like these from ever being legal. They define weights and measures, test and certify building materials, and make sure that fly-by-night companies don't sell substandard products and take the profits to the Caribbean, leaving someone else to bear the cost of their negligence.
- this is what "the civilized" world likes to believe, but it does not make it true or right. What do government's officials understand about measurements? Nothing. They understand nothing about building materials or substandard products. All of this is about working competition. However government must make it a full time job - doling out justice and punishment to those, who abuse the trust. You build a house that collapses and kills people? Well, let's find out how you did such a wonderful job, if it can be shown that you did a substandard job and cut costs while not following the best standards of your industry - your company is dismantled, your profits are confiscated and you spend the rest of your life in jail. Sounds fine.
With your fascination with no regulations, you may have been at home in the Victorian era. Slavery, children as young as 4 working mills, mines, blacking factories, dying young from simple exposure to the chemicals they worked with. Child prostitution. Everyone else was working sixteen hours a day for little pay, getting dumped in a ditch if they were seriously injured on the job, people burning to death in locked buildings... and no government regulations to get in the way and slow down the economy. No annoying fire safety standards, housing standards, workplace safety standards...
- sounds dreamy. That is what capitalism and industrialization FIXED and that is what the government is going to CAUSE yet again, by killing an economy that was built by capitalism.
And, since you seem to be preoccupied with the red herring about fiat currency,
You are right of-course, however here is a good example why it is still possible to get something of value from ArXiv before you can get it from anywhere else.