Insufficient profit margin? So the problem is that the pharmaceutical companies can't make enough money off of this unpatented drug, and the answer is to just hand them a patent? Aspirin isn't patented, but we still see companies making that. If we're going to effectively take the free market out of the equation by handing out a patent for doing nothing, why NOT have the government do it? Don't even start with the whole "government isn't efficient" bullshit. You've just taken any hope of efficiency out of the system by removing any competition.
Call me an idiot, but free information is preferable. Information is non-exclusive, it does not behave like normal property and the market is not able to handle exchange of non-exclusive goods efficiently. Patents are granted to benefit society, not the individual, and any time they benefit the individual at the expense of society, they should not be granted. Property rights are a positive right, not a natural right. Individual possesion is an important right, ownership of natural resources is theft of that resource. Resources should be controlled and administered by small, local democratic organizations. Monopolies are inefficient. they represent a market failure and should be regulated.
In short, the free market exists to benefit all, not just a few sharks. It works well where it works but it is not magic and it is not divine. It absolutely needs regulation to stay free because money can be used to control and manipulate markets just as easily as political power can be. With political solutions, the electorate can demand transparency. Not so with market based solution.
Where are you getting your data? You think Knuckles is lying when he says Austrian public health care has 4% overhead? Or is it only the US govt. that is horribly inefficient? Or perhaps it is only that your ideological blinders keep you from seeing the truth: public health care is FAR more efficient.
Maybe this was all part of the publicity stunt. Maybe only a few officers were in on it. That's all it would take. Initial bribes: $50,000. Cleanup and goodwill money: $2M. All the national and international publicity: priceless./tinfoil-hat
It's actually interesting the hoops that Muslim's have to jump through. It's also kind of amusing because the goals and end results are the same, only the names are changed. It's all about how a society chooses to share risks and rewards. A loan by any other name...
Bah. I never said people don't need to work to support themselves. Tell me, when you own nothing and the only way to support yourself is to do whatever your landlord tells you, is that freedom?
Not mine, and it's not a sin anymore. The good is not the best. It's the is-aught problem. Sure, a moneylender let's you buy your own house, but it is the best method for doing so?
What do tax collectors have to do with anything? Jesus hated people who lent money for profit, usury was a sin, tax collectors have nothing to do with either.
He bought the computer with pirated Windows pre-installed. His claim not to know isn't based on not knowing piracy is wrong (what an amusingly arrogant point of view, "He's from a foreign country. They don't have modern things like copyright law in there.") It's based on not knowing that copy was pirated.
Nah, it's capitalism that removes the social consequences. Look at the timber industry, they go in, clearcut an area, move on and put everyone out of work. No consequences, resources squandered. Direct democracy removes the "politically connected" from the picture, there goes that objection. Can't understand your efficiency objection. By fostering competition, where information is not freely shared, capitalism encourages inefficiency. It also promotes duplication of effort, as competing firms do the same thing in different ways instead of more efficienctly centralizing the redundant aspects of production. The unwashed masses never seem to reap the benfits of private ownership. Almost by definition, "unwashed masses" are not in the owning classes. You've just squandered a paragraph with arguments that don't make your point effectively. Private ownership of natural resources is fundamentally oppressive, unegalitarian, unjust, and unfair. Private ownership of private property is fine, but everyone must have access to and share in control of the means of production, otherwise all the economic freedom in the world will still lead to slavery.
Hehe, it actually happens on slashdot more than you might think, if you are open to it. Believe it or not, it's one of the main reasons I keep coming back here. I'd rather live in a peanut gallery than an echo chamber. At least in a peanut gallery you occasionally see some peanuts you've never seen before.
No man is an island. No one can be what they can not imagine. What we are capable of imagining is based on what society expects of us. There is no other place that this can come from, the individual starts out as a blank slate. The world would be a simpler place if the individualists were right, but it is far more complicated than that.
Oppression is real. Not everyone can make anything of themselves, and it isn't just a matter of will. The problem of individualism is that it actually encourages the individual to deny that the consequences of his actions have an impact on any other individual, becasue that other could just decide not to be affected by it.
The system matters. Not every flexible system is as good as any other at encouraging the best in individuals. You can in fact blame the system for the failings of individuals, just as you can blame individuals for the failings of a system. There is a complicated feedback loop between the individual and society.
If you are against democracy and capitalism, what system are you in favor of?
I've often wondered, how is private ownership the answer to TTOC? Private owners are free to run a resource into the ground, take the profits and buy a new resource. A democratically controlled resource would not be squandered like that.
Absolutely. And not all Christians are idiots who believe in ridiculous fairy tales, as some here seem to believe. I just wanted you to know that some of us here understand that. Some of the nicest, most moral, smartest people I've met have been Christians. They have all been like you, people of quiet faith. They never stick it in your face, never judge, just try their best to live their lives as they believe Christ would want. I've never thought that being a real Christian meant going to church or following anyone other than Christ.
I'm not a Christian myself. I opened my heart and really, really tried. Accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, etc., etc. It did nothing for me. I felt no connection, no personal relationship to Christ. Christianity was just not meant to be my path. If their is a God worth worshipping, I'm sure He/She/It understands.:) But I respect all people of faith even though I have none.
Profit is not just "all things good." Profit is not just income. Profit is income that is not derived from work, but from investment of money. People who take profits take money that rightfully belongs to others who actually worked for it. There is a reason Jesus got angry at the money lenders in the temple. There is a reason that lending money for profit was considered a sin.
Just because the capitalists are not the first to impose on others freedoms, and just because they do it economically rather than politically does not make it right. Freedom means having the means to support yourself. Capitalism concentrates wealth into fewer and fewer hands, because the more money you have, the easier it is to game the system. The free market can only remain free if we keep people from abusing their economic power.
Freedom means having the means to support yourself. When everything in the world is owned by a small percentage of the population, the rest of us are "free" to sell ourselves into slavery for our next meal. That is capitalism, the freedom to choose between being a slave or starving.
I read all your argument. You recomended reading books that were already in the public domain. Nothing in your argument speaks to the lengths of copyright for new material, or more importantly, to technological barriers such as DRM and encryption effectively keeping all content locked up even when copyright expires.
Read before responding with pseudo intellectual babble next time, k?
Thanks for your constructive criticism. The real problem is the problem addressed in the article, where technological and legal barrieers to entry are erected to keep small players from entering the entertainment market. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
Yes, I forgot. In the New American Christianity, Jesus was a capitalist entrepreneur who helped the money lenders set up a profitable business plan and NOT lending for profit is a sin.
Hey, I'm not saying you agree with wingnuts. I'm just saying, people have been KILLED over making up their own definitions of the word "Christian," you dig? The Ecumenical Councils defined what scriptures were included in the Bible and what beliefs you could profess without being killed as a heretic. They specifically EXCLUDED some people who were calling themselves Christians. That's factual history. The organized religion known as Christianity is very specifically defined as those churches that follow the dictates of the Ecumenical Councils. You are free to disagree with them, but that is the commonly accepted definition, for over a thousand years.
Why not say, "Follower of Christ," if that is closer to what you mean? You can't expect people to know what you mean when you use a word differently than everyone else! I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that you are redefining a word to mean what you want it to mean. Don't be upset if others get confused, is all.
Nothing can be created in a vacuum. The corporations are free to "own" anything they have created that is not derived from the thousands of years of culture that have gone before. Once all culture is owned, nothing new can ever be made without paying a fee to some company, as everything will be a derived from something owned by a corporation.
I know I am going against the groupthink here and will be modded accordingly, ...
The world does not exist to entertain you, I know that is hard to swallow, but it is true. ...
read one of the huge number of public domain books, actually talk to other human beings instead of being glued to the screen
FYI, it is more than likely your arrogant, condescending attitude that will get you down-modded, not some imaginary "groupthink."
"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life
According to the thought experiment of The Tragedy of the Commons, any resource that is not owned will be misused. For the sake of our culture, we need to give it away to a large corporation that can care for it properly. It's the capitalist thing to do. You aren't a communist terrorist jihadist, are you?
If you aren't willing to give your culture away to a big company, then buy back whatever little pieces of it they want to dole out, then you hate capitalism, the free market, and America. Probably Mom and apple pie, too.
Just wanted to let you know, as you seem to be getting a lot of flack from the anti-christians. I hope my original comment didn't offend too much. I was pointing out that by the common definition of the word "Christian" there is a "party line." I didn't really make that comment to put down you or Christianity, more to point out that in the beginning, there were some very interesting questions raised, and people had very different and conflicting answers. The organized religion known as Christianity that we have today is based on the outcome of the power struggle epitomized by the Councils.
What you practice is more properly called the Christian Mysticism, which emphasises personal experience with the Divine above all else. You have a personal relationship with Christ, you say that makes you a Christian, and I agree. But you have to understand, most people will take that to mean that you identify as a member of the organized religion known as Christianity, and that is well defined and not open to personal interpretation. I could claim that because I occasionally drink wine and eat biscuits that I am a Christian. Few others would accept my interpretation, and that is perfectly fine. Words have to have a commonly accepted meaning to be useful. Blue is not red, no matter how many times I say it is I won't get many to go along with me.
You are ignoring the truth that markets can be manipulated with money as easily as with political power. In a free market system wealth invariably concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. Even if you don't buy that, you must see that wealth is distributed so inequitably that there will exist some class of people for whom the only good economic alternative is to sell themselves into slavery.
When all the world is owned, those who do not own the means of production become the slaves of those who do, as otherwise they have no means of supporting themselves. The owners are the wolves, the people who do not own and must sell themelves into slavery are the lambs. Get it?
I aqree that there must be limits on what the majority can do. In business as well as politics. I fail to comprehend how so many people can think that domination, extortion and control are okay if carried out through economic means but not if carried out through political means.
In regards to free market types scaring the crap out of me, I am refering to people who think that the unregulated free market is a more equitable and fair way of excercising control than democracy. As in the ancient Greek kyklos, people in a Democracy are free to elect a tyrant, and often do. It makes no difference whether that is a political or economic tyrant.
Syndicalism, as practised by the Mondragon Collective, a large group of Basques in Spain, has done far better than capitalism by any objective measure. Look them up and get back to me if you disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
Shake is already shilling for Boost Mobile and Axe Body Spray.
I'm with you, let's make this the new "jumped the shark."
Insufficient profit margin? So the problem is that the pharmaceutical companies can't make enough money off of this unpatented drug, and the answer is to just hand them a patent? Aspirin isn't patented, but we still see companies making that. If we're going to effectively take the free market out of the equation by handing out a patent for doing nothing, why NOT have the government do it? Don't even start with the whole "government isn't efficient" bullshit. You've just taken any hope of efficiency out of the system by removing any competition.
Call me an idiot, but free information is preferable. Information is non-exclusive, it does not behave like normal property and the market is not able to handle exchange of non-exclusive goods efficiently. Patents are granted to benefit society, not the individual, and any time they benefit the individual at the expense of society, they should not be granted. Property rights are a positive right, not a natural right. Individual possesion is an important right, ownership of natural resources is theft of that resource. Resources should be controlled and administered by small, local democratic organizations. Monopolies are inefficient. they represent a market failure and should be regulated.
In short, the free market exists to benefit all, not just a few sharks. It works well where it works but it is not magic and it is not divine. It absolutely needs regulation to stay free because money can be used to control and manipulate markets just as easily as political power can be. With political solutions, the electorate can demand transparency. Not so with market based solution.
Where are you getting your data? You think Knuckles is lying when he says Austrian public health care has 4% overhead? Or is it only the US govt. that is horribly inefficient? Or perhaps it is only that your ideological blinders keep you from seeing the truth: public health care is FAR more efficient.
Maybe this was all part of the publicity stunt. Maybe only a few officers were in on it. That's all it would take. Initial bribes: $50,000. Cleanup and goodwill money: $2M. All the national and international publicity: priceless. /tinfoil-hat
It's actually interesting the hoops that Muslim's have to jump through. It's also kind of amusing because the goals and end results are the same, only the names are changed. It's all about how a society chooses to share risks and rewards. A loan by any other name...
Bah. I never said people don't need to work to support themselves. Tell me, when you own nothing and the only way to support yourself is to do whatever your landlord tells you, is that freedom?
Not mine, and it's not a sin anymore. The good is not the best. It's the is-aught problem. Sure, a moneylender let's you buy your own house, but it is the best method for doing so?
What do tax collectors have to do with anything? Jesus hated people who lent money for profit, usury was a sin, tax collectors have nothing to do with either.
He bought the computer with pirated Windows pre-installed. His claim not to know isn't based on not knowing piracy is wrong (what an amusingly arrogant point of view, "He's from a foreign country. They don't have modern things like copyright law in there.") It's based on not knowing that copy was pirated.
Nah, it's capitalism that removes the social consequences. Look at the timber industry, they go in, clearcut an area, move on and put everyone out of work. No consequences, resources squandered. Direct democracy removes the "politically connected" from the picture, there goes that objection. Can't understand your efficiency objection. By fostering competition, where information is not freely shared, capitalism encourages inefficiency. It also promotes duplication of effort, as competing firms do the same thing in different ways instead of more efficienctly centralizing the redundant aspects of production. The unwashed masses never seem to reap the benfits of private ownership. Almost by definition, "unwashed masses" are not in the owning classes. You've just squandered a paragraph with arguments that don't make your point effectively. Private ownership of natural resources is fundamentally oppressive, unegalitarian, unjust, and unfair. Private ownership of private property is fine, but everyone must have access to and share in control of the means of production, otherwise all the economic freedom in the world will still lead to slavery.
Hehe, it actually happens on slashdot more than you might think, if you are open to it. Believe it or not, it's one of the main reasons I keep coming back here. I'd rather live in a peanut gallery than an echo chamber. At least in a peanut gallery you occasionally see some peanuts you've never seen before.
Is that true?
No man is an island. No one can be what they can not imagine. What we are capable of imagining is based on what society expects of us. There is no other place that this can come from, the individual starts out as a blank slate. The world would be a simpler place if the individualists were right, but it is far more complicated than that.
Oppression is real. Not everyone can make anything of themselves, and it isn't just a matter of will. The problem of individualism is that it actually encourages the individual to deny that the consequences of his actions have an impact on any other individual, becasue that other could just decide not to be affected by it.
The system matters. Not every flexible system is as good as any other at encouraging the best in individuals. You can in fact blame the system for the failings of individuals, just as you can blame individuals for the failings of a system. There is a complicated feedback loop between the individual and society.
If you are against democracy and capitalism, what system are you in favor of?
True, but not funny.
I've often wondered, how is private ownership the answer to TTOC? Private owners are free to run a resource into the ground, take the profits and buy a new resource. A democratically controlled resource would not be squandered like that.
Absolutely. And not all Christians are idiots who believe in ridiculous fairy tales, as some here seem to believe. I just wanted you to know that some of us here understand that. Some of the nicest, most moral, smartest people I've met have been Christians. They have all been like you, people of quiet faith. They never stick it in your face, never judge, just try their best to live their lives as they believe Christ would want. I've never thought that being a real Christian meant going to church or following anyone other than Christ.
:) But I respect all people of faith even though I have none.
I'm not a Christian myself. I opened my heart and really, really tried. Accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, etc., etc. It did nothing for me. I felt no connection, no personal relationship to Christ. Christianity was just not meant to be my path. If their is a God worth worshipping, I'm sure He/She/It understands.
Profit is not just "all things good." Profit is not just income. Profit is income that is not derived from work, but from investment of money. People who take profits take money that rightfully belongs to others who actually worked for it. There is a reason Jesus got angry at the money lenders in the temple. There is a reason that lending money for profit was considered a sin.
Just because the capitalists are not the first to impose on others freedoms, and just because they do it economically rather than politically does not make it right. Freedom means having the means to support yourself. Capitalism concentrates wealth into fewer and fewer hands, because the more money you have, the easier it is to game the system. The free market can only remain free if we keep people from abusing their economic power.
Freedom means having the means to support yourself. When everything in the world is owned by a small percentage of the population, the rest of us are "free" to sell ourselves into slavery for our next meal. That is capitalism, the freedom to choose between being a slave or starving.
I read all your argument. You recomended reading books that were already in the public domain. Nothing in your argument speaks to the lengths of copyright for new material, or more importantly, to technological barriers such as DRM and encryption effectively keeping all content locked up even when copyright expires.
Read before responding with pseudo intellectual babble next time, k?
Thanks for your constructive criticism. The real problem is the problem addressed in the article, where technological and legal barrieers to entry are erected to keep small players from entering the entertainment market. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
Yes, I forgot. In the New American Christianity, Jesus was a capitalist entrepreneur who helped the money lenders set up a profitable business plan and NOT lending for profit is a sin.
Hey, I'm not saying you agree with wingnuts. I'm just saying, people have been KILLED over making up their own definitions of the word "Christian," you dig? The Ecumenical Councils defined what scriptures were included in the Bible and what beliefs you could profess without being killed as a heretic. They specifically EXCLUDED some people who were calling themselves Christians. That's factual history. The organized religion known as Christianity is very specifically defined as those churches that follow the dictates of the Ecumenical Councils. You are free to disagree with them, but that is the commonly accepted definition, for over a thousand years.
Why not say, "Follower of Christ," if that is closer to what you mean? You can't expect people to know what you mean when you use a word differently than everyone else! I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that you are redefining a word to mean what you want it to mean. Don't be upset if others get confused, is all.
"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life
According to the thought experiment of The Tragedy of the Commons, any resource that is not owned will be misused. For the sake of our culture, we need to give it away to a large corporation that can care for it properly. It's the capitalist thing to do. You aren't a communist terrorist jihadist, are you?
If you aren't willing to give your culture away to a big company, then buy back whatever little pieces of it they want to dole out, then you hate capitalism, the free market, and America. Probably Mom and apple pie, too.
Just wanted to let you know, as you seem to be getting a lot of flack from the anti-christians. I hope my original comment didn't offend too much. I was pointing out that by the common definition of the word "Christian" there is a "party line." I didn't really make that comment to put down you or Christianity, more to point out that in the beginning, there were some very interesting questions raised, and people had very different and conflicting answers. The organized religion known as Christianity that we have today is based on the outcome of the power struggle epitomized by the Councils.
What you practice is more properly called the Christian Mysticism, which emphasises personal experience with the Divine above all else. You have a personal relationship with Christ, you say that makes you a Christian, and I agree. But you have to understand, most people will take that to mean that you identify as a member of the organized religion known as Christianity, and that is well defined and not open to personal interpretation. I could claim that because I occasionally drink wine and eat biscuits that I am a Christian. Few others would accept my interpretation, and that is perfectly fine. Words have to have a commonly accepted meaning to be useful. Blue is not red, no matter how many times I say it is I won't get many to go along with me.
You are ignoring the truth that markets can be manipulated with money as easily as with political power. In a free market system wealth invariably concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. Even if you don't buy that, you must see that wealth is distributed so inequitably that there will exist some class of people for whom the only good economic alternative is to sell themselves into slavery.
When all the world is owned, those who do not own the means of production become the slaves of those who do, as otherwise they have no means of supporting themselves. The owners are the wolves, the people who do not own and must sell themelves into slavery are the lambs. Get it?
I aqree that there must be limits on what the majority can do. In business as well as politics. I fail to comprehend how so many people can think that domination, extortion and control are okay if carried out through economic means but not if carried out through political means.
In regards to free market types scaring the crap out of me, I am refering to people who think that the unregulated free market is a more equitable and fair way of excercising control than democracy. As in the ancient Greek kyklos, people in a Democracy are free to elect a tyrant, and often do. It makes no difference whether that is a political or economic tyrant.
Syndicalism, as practised by the Mondragon Collective, a large group of Basques in Spain, has done far better than capitalism by any objective measure. Look them up and get back to me if you disagree.