I hate those stupid pop-ups on the bottom of the screen. Ever see the ones that make noise, usually some awful blatting, whooshing sound? Makes me want to track down the ad executive responsible, cuff him to a chair, superglue his eyelids open and make him watch his own crap advertising over and over again until he goes completely insane.
On topic, what about those of us who use the skip forward button? I with skip, you still have a chance of catching a frame of an ad or two, but really, who pays attention to that? Don't these fools get it? I'm not interested. I'm not going to buy their product because I saw a frame of it on TV.
So how long do you suppose it will be until these sick bastards buy themselves enough congress critters to make it illegal to not watch ads? It's stealing! Stealing coke right out of their noses!
I don't know where you get the idea that I want to rob the dead. I feel that people who fence off natural resources are robbing the living. Wanting to take back what was stolen from you is not robbery, it's justice.
I got so sick of answering my Granny's cat Sylvester's problems with viruses and spyware on his windows machine that I finally switched him to Ubuntu. It detected his Acme Bird Scanner, his Acme Digitally Controlled Shotgun and Acme Easy-Bake Rotisserie Oven right off the bat. He's not the brightest cat in the world but he says he hasn't had a single problem with his computer and that it works great!! He says, "Thufferin' thuccotash! Thith ith the betht bird catthing devithe I've ever uthed!" and ever more impressive, I didn't have time to train him on anything and he has picked it all up wonderfully on his own. He understands Open Bird and doesn't notice the difference between that and MS Bird. He even figured out how to install a packet sniffer, grabbed Granny's credit card numbers, and now everytime Tweety has a little accident, he goes on Petsmart and orders a new Tweety. He's on tweetypedia all the time, looking up new recipes.
Hey, I read slashdot for the useful and timely information about industry trends. I emailed several slashdot articles with month-old security news and thinly disguised corporate press releases to my boss, and now "read slashdot daily" is part of my job description.
I just hope they never find out the kind of crap I post here...
Austrian economists are by no means mainstream, they are a weird little splinter group that mainstream economists generally scoff at. Now, of course this doesn't mean they are wrong, but it's a good clue.
Did you not even see the dismbiguation link on the wiki page you linked to? I was refering to theindustrialist robber-barons
How about you wait until Microsoft actually topples from a monopoly psition before using them as an example of how monopolies naturally disappear?
As for lassez faire, the 19th century was well known for its social inequality and brutal working conditions, all of which were at least in part due to this outdated and failed philosophy. It took unions forcing governments to intervene before we did away with lassez faire's lovely legacy of unsafe work conditions, 16 hour work-days, 7 day work-weeks, low pay, and child labor.
The "Hey dude, everything's groovy" attitude of the Common Hippy generally wins out over the "Ima git mah gun!" attitude of the North American Puff-Necked Libertarian. Although combining the two usually results in an unstable hybrid that is liable to snap at any moment under the strain of reconciling the Hippy's "Hey, everybody, let's share" beliefs with the "I got mine, everyone else can go hang," attitude of the Libertarian. Dangers aside, further study of this rare and fascinating hybrid is warranted.
I know all about Stalin, the cultural revolution and the killing fields. Tyrrany under the guise of communism, but that is communism's natural end-point. I'm opposed to communism and any kind of coercive use of power. Protection of private property requires a large amount of state sponsored coercive power. I'm not proposing any kind of top-down, imposed structure, merely advocating for a structure that people could adopt locally, and that would scale well through federation. I'm also stating, that as protection of privately held natural resources requires the threat of state sponsored violence, no anarchist federation need respect the property claims of private holders.
Either you weren't paying attention or I was not stating my position clearly. In any case, I'm glad we seem to have moved beyond invective so we can get to the real meat of the issue.
Learn your history, you freak. I'm an anarchist, the commies hate us as much as they hate the capitalists. Why do you think Trotsky got an icepick in the ear? You have no idea what you're talking about, it's all just "looters who want to take mah propuh-tie!" to you, isn't it?. You're the looter, you fascist propertarian. I'm sure as far as your concerned the whole rest of humanity can go to hell, as long as you've got yours. Selfish sociopathic git. Society made you what you are, it gave you everything you have, including the language you so blithely use to disparage it. Without society you'd be no more than a starving animal. You owe society a debt that can't be measured. So you can take your propertarian nonsense and stick it up your fat ass, you smirking chimp. I tried to have a civil conversation with you and figure out where you disagreed with me, but it appears that all you are capable of is hooting and flinging feces. You obviously aren't smart enough to bother with.
Oh, indeed. I myself enjoy a good troll now and then. GNAA and their ilk may be infantile amateurs, but some of the best trolls on the intarweb still ply these waters. Heck, you almost had me.
Personally, Libertarians are my favorite target. Hippies are too damn mellow, they're all like, "I support your right to your opinion, man, but I, like, respectfully disagree." Boring. Quote some Proudhon at them and Libertarians are like, "I'm gonna git mah gun and come shoot your dog in the face iff'n you tries to mess with my propuh-tie!" Much more entertaining.;-)
I was all set to be offended, but it's a good laugh. I don't think he's actually dissing hippies here so much as just poking fun. So knock it off with the troll mods. That kind of oppression is so uncool, man, I mean, if we can't laugh at ourselves, we need to smoke more pot, am I right? The dude may be too square to realize that you don't generally get rowdy and smash stuff when you toke up, but that doesn't make him a troll. Come on, mods, don't be like The Man here, putting your negativity onto this poor dude, let him be himself.
Private real property requires system of control as well. It needs enforcement by state power to be effective, otherwise we are talking about the tyranny of the strong. You gloss over my main point, that is, private property entails choice theft. Non-property holders have no stake in a system of private property ownership.
The systems I mention would not own property but would manage it on behalf of it's true owners, the people of the world, collectively. I don't have the answers as to where it would exist or how it would exert its influence, as these issues would be decided by the people who's interests are being represented.
Every stakeholder in the system would participate in the decision making process, but exactly how and to what degree isn't up to me, but the citizens of planet earth. Not fetuses or chimpanzees, but even smartass humans would be allowed to vote in these matters, or the system would not be fair and equitable. You are using loaded questions to cast unwarrented aspersions without explainign how our current system doesn't produce the same unwanted outcomes.
As for how the syetm would balance individual desires, that is up to the participants in such a system to decide. Individual ownership of natural resources is theft, not a system of collective control, because a collective system vests control in everyone rather than only property owners.
As for your next set of questions, I will pose one of my own. What choice do non property owners who do not wish to participate in our current system have?
In my proposal, property would be fenced off from those not wanting to participate, because those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources are thieves who are stealing those resources from the rest of us. But I would advocate for a distributed, bottom up style of control where individual groups could take their collective share of property and choose to mediate control through a free market system.
I don't believe any particular person or small group's definition of ethics should be imposed on everyone. But that is what is happening now.
New Hampshire contains nearly six billion acres of land. Your point is moot, though, because if natural resources weren't scarce they wouldn't have any value in our current system.
The Mondragon Collective in Spain is perhaps the best example of a system somewhat similar to mine put into practice on a large scale, although there are admitedly some differences. I leave it up to you to look it up and research it if you are interested.
It should be noted that private property ownership requires violence to enforce it's rules.
Now, how about you answer a question, as neither you nor anyone else I've discussed this with has been willing or able to refute my major points. Just one question, but it is a big one. On what basis do you justify private ownerhsip of natural resources?
She's the one on the right. I kid you not. Bow-chicka-bow-ow! Ms. Williams? I'm here to fix your hot tub. Uh oh, looks like I'm gonna hafta lay some new pipe!
Every other woman listed seems to be active in the game industry today. Roberta is retired, more's the pity. When I was a young geek gamer, I had such a crush on her despite the fact that she's 17 years older than me. Girl geek gamer and hot to boot, what's not to love?
The free market isn't really so free, is it? Where's my Drug-n-Hooker Mart? That's it, I'm making my own free market, with drugs, and hookers! In fact, forget the free market part. I'm moving to an island someplace and I'm taking all the drugs and hookers with me. All you squares can have fun with your drug-and-hooker-less so-called free market.
You should get that knee looked at, it's jerking pretty hard there. I picture you getting to that line and steam coming out of your ears. First, you realize I'm talking about real property, not personal property, right? And I provide a decent argument as to why real property is theft, which I note you haven't actually tried to refute on its merits, but simply dismissed. Perhaps you have no way of refuting my argument, but can't stand to admit that? Ah, well, you can always lug out the trusty ad hominem, can't you? That'll refute anything! I bet all ten far right conservatives with an IQ under 90 who read slashdot are saying, "Yeeehaw! Y'all done showed him!"
You'll have to do better than that if you want to impress anyone intelligent, right, left or center. Look at my fans list. Like it or not, lots of people here take me seriously. Maybe this bastion of commies and lefties is not really the placed for you, hmmm? Maybe you'd be more comfortable on a site like freerepublic.com, where everyone thinks like you do and pointless ad hominems rule? Obviously you aren't someone who likes having their ideology questioned or their assumptions challenged, and you have a very narrow and limited view of what is considered normal and acceptable discourse, so a site like that would be perfect for someone of your level of intellectual development.
See? Two can play at the ad hominem game, and quite frankly, I think I play it better. But if you'd rather to have a rational discussion, I'll be waiting.
Socialism as a philosophy isn't responsible for 100 million dead. Now who's making up statistics (yes, I was, so I'll admit it here rather than reply to three seperate posts.) Communism can certainly be held responsible for a large number of deaths, but the two are not the same. And I'm neither, I'm an anarchist, like Proudhon, who was the earliest critic of Marx, by the way. You may want to learn a little about history before disdainfully dismissing anyone's philosophy, if only to figure out why it's wrong and better refute it. Or maybe you're just the ad hominem type. Or the type who has found the One True Path and can tolerate no deviance from it.
I gave a good explanation as to why property is theft, and you did nothing to refute my explanation, so we'll try this again. Firstly, I'm talking about real property: land, natural resource, etc. I'm not talking about the fruits of your labor, things you worked on. Those are yours. As I said, I'm no communist. But no one owned any land before some smart guy got the idea of fencing it off, so everyone had the opportunity to use it in a shared fashion. In order to mix your labor with land and have a legitimate right to call it yours, you need to exclude others from it, thus the act of mixing your labor necesarily happens before you have a legitimate claim. It is the same as me stealing a bike, painting it, and calling it my own because I worked on it.
Now, we come to the heart of the argument. The people who you exclude from your property are only getting one thing in exchange for the agreement not to trespass, and that is that you will uphold their claims to property as well. The whole notion of property can only be based on this agreement, justification by so-called natural rights just doesn't fly. I have the natural right to do anything that's in my power to do, including killing you and taking your land. I won't kill you because that is the ultimate choice theft, I have taken away all your possible choices. Owning property is a lesser crime, it takes away the choice to use that property, but it takes it from everyone.
So what do all the non-property holders get in exchange for their agreement not to use your property? Nothing. So they have no ethical reason to honor your request. The only reason they have is the threat of force, and that's not a very good justification in my book.
I see two possible solutions to this dilemma. One, a system that distributes an equitable amount of real property to everyone, so everyone is a party to the contract. Two, a system of democratic control of property where everyone is a party to the contract. To me, these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property.
I've stated my case as clearly as possible. If you think I am wrong-headed here, I ask that you provide a clear argument as to why. As I stated, I'm not an idealist, and if you can provide a convincing argument, I will change my tune in a heartbeat. I've done it before when I've seen that my reasoning is flawed, and I'm sure I'll do it again. So I ask you, where have I gone wrong in my thinking?
First point: you are right, and this is the hardest part in designing any system! How do you prevent concentration of power. First, everything should be decided by choice and contract. No coercion. But we do have to have laws that keep people from taking away other people's choices unjustly. And I see taking natural resources as a kind of choice theft. Our system of representative democracy provides a good blueprint for a system of checks and balances, but for continued good functioning it needs an educated and involved populace.
Second point: I am talking here about the issue addressed in the well known economic paper that was published in 19790, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" by George Akerlof. Basically, the problem is thus: Buyers and sellers of used cars do not have equal access to information about those cars. Sellers have a motive to overstate the value of their cars, therefore buyers must assume that all used cars are less valuable than stated. This drives down the market value of used cars, which in turn drives the sellers with higher quality cars out of the market, making the problem even worse.
Third point: nobody creates value on their own. They are part of a system. Leaders have no value without followers. Innovators have the cushion of security needed to innovate precisely because the majority of people don't innovate but just do what worked for their ancestors. By overvaluing certain systemic functions such as leadership or innovation, the system encourages people who would not naturally drawn to those roles to do them even though they aren't suited to them. You can't have a system that is all leaders and innovators, it wouldn't work.
As for giving the people wo are good at what they do more control, I agree. excellence should be rewarded, and in fact this fits with most people's sense of fairness. If someone was producing something of value in a system of democratically controlled resources, do you not think that people would vote to give that person greater control?
I work for the state. 'nuff said? But I have been screwed over by small business owners who I thought were my friends, too.
People like you, who work hard, take risks, are good and decent, and provide opportunities for other should be rewarded. I can't stress this enough. I'm not a communist in that regard. But there should be limits to the amount of money and power that anyone is allowed to accumulate, and I wuold put that limit squarely at the point that one person's power and money compromises another person's ability to be free to make their own best choices.
I love rockets. I'm a network admin by trade, specializing in Linux, clusters, HA systems, IBM BladeCenter & VMWare. I do have a job, and it's not bad for being a state job. I've seen worse run IT departments in private companies, actually. I actually wish I had more to do, and a manager who was more involved and gave me a little more direction. As it is, I have a lot of leeway but little satisfaction.
The reason I converse is not to prove I'm right, but rather to find out if.
This is a common belief, but I don't buy it. I've worked the hardest on things I haven't gotten paid for, that I did for love, and I don't feel like I'm exceptional here. In fact, our system devalues intrinsic motivations and replaces them with an artificial punishment/reward system. In a system of distributed wealth/control, people would work hard in order to earn the respect of their peers, to "scratch an itch," to get a desireable mate, to leave a legacy, and simply to feel good. The human animal is driven to excel not from fear, not from some arbitrary desire to get ahead, but from love. Have you never done anything in your life simply because you loved it? Have you never felt the joy that comes from doing an excellent job, or from exceding your own personal best at soemthing? If that's the case, I feel sorry for you, and I mean that. I'm not trying to be condescending. To me, that's the most important part of being human, and the greatest tragedy of capitalism is that it crushes that part of the human spirit.
Re:Why do 10% of the people own and control 90%...
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HP's Dunn Stepping Down
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· Score: 3, Informative
Estate tax is a good place to start, but I'm an old school anarchist of the Proudhon variety, and I believe that property is theft. Not personal property, but natural resources. There is no justification for fencing off land and taking away other people's freedom to use it. You have to have labored over something before you have a right to call it your own, and you have to own something before you have a right to keep others from using it. Therefore, no one has any justification in holding natural resources as their own.
I have not come up with the perfect solution to this dilemma. As Proudhon also, less famously said, property is also the only real protection against tyranny and is inherently anarchistic because it respects no king or lord. I feel their are two choices, Proudhon's idea of communal control of resources or some form of distributarianism. In communal control there is the plus that the process of deciding on how to use resources is democratic, but without a strong constitution and a system of checks and balances this can lead to a tyranny of the majority. With distributarianism, everyone owns their little portion of the means of production, but who arbitrates this ownership, and how do we ensure that the means are distribuited equitably.
There are many problems with the free market as a system of arbitration. It requires perfect information on the part of all actors to work efficiently. It can not correctly value the costs and benefits of externalities. It does not operate efficiently where the marginal cost of entry into markets is very high (commonly known as a monopoly.) It has no negative feedback cycle to prevent a runaway accumulation of wealth by a few people. The more wealth one has, the easier it is to make more by using your wealth to game the system and ensure their isn't a level playing field. The free market can not think ahead and come up with solutions. It can only say what isn't working, not what might work better, and if what might work better is locked out due to any of the previously mentioned root causes of market failure, we will be stuck with what we have.
We have a system that expects and rewards selfishness. So much so that even though the majority of people have been shown in modern economic experiments to favor fairness and reciprocity over personal gain, they will act selfishly rather than cooperatively because that is what the system rewards. In fact, the system gives free reign to screw over the naturally cooperative (and this is a large part of the reason behind my "bad luck." I'm too nice and too trusting, and I am not willing to sell out that part of myself just to get ahead.)
Remember, your friends, relatives and acquantences are not a random sample of the population. You have probably not met the legions of people for whom the system has not worked, despite their best efforts, so it is no stretch for you to think of those people in the abstract sense, and to believe that they had all the opportunities that you did. It's just easier to think that they are where they are because they are lazy than to feel like you have to change the whole system.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate those stupid pop-ups on the bottom of the screen. Ever see the ones that make noise, usually some awful blatting, whooshing sound? Makes me want to track down the ad executive responsible, cuff him to a chair, superglue his eyelids open and make him watch his own crap advertising over and over again until he goes completely insane.
On topic, what about those of us who use the skip forward button? I with skip, you still have a chance of catching a frame of an ad or two, but really, who pays attention to that? Don't these fools get it? I'm not interested. I'm not going to buy their product because I saw a frame of it on TV.
So how long do you suppose it will be until these sick bastards buy themselves enough congress critters to make it illegal to not watch ads? It's stealing! Stealing coke right out of their noses!
You kids and your fancy flat files. Back in my day, we kept our data in huge honking boxes of punchcards, and we were grateful!
I don't know where you get the idea that I want to rob the dead. I feel that people who fence off natural resources are robbing the living. Wanting to take back what was stolen from you is not robbery, it's justice.
I got so sick of answering my Granny's cat Sylvester's problems with viruses and spyware on his windows machine that I finally switched him to Ubuntu. It detected his Acme Bird Scanner, his Acme Digitally Controlled Shotgun and Acme Easy-Bake Rotisserie Oven right off the bat. He's not the brightest cat in the world but he says he hasn't had a single problem with his computer and that it works great!! He says, "Thufferin' thuccotash! Thith ith the betht bird catthing devithe I've ever uthed!" and ever more impressive, I didn't have time to train him on anything and he has picked it all up wonderfully on his own. He understands Open Bird and doesn't notice the difference between that and MS Bird. He even figured out how to install a packet sniffer, grabbed Granny's credit card numbers, and now everytime Tweety has a little accident, he goes on Petsmart and orders a new Tweety. He's on tweetypedia all the time, looking up new recipes.
Hey, I read slashdot for the useful and timely information about industry trends. I emailed several slashdot articles with month-old security news and thinly disguised corporate press releases to my boss, and now "read slashdot daily" is part of my job description.
I just hope they never find out the kind of crap I post here...
Austrian economists are by no means mainstream, they are a weird little splinter group that mainstream economists generally scoff at. Now, of course this doesn't mean they are wrong, but it's a good clue.
Did you not even see the dismbiguation link on the wiki page you linked to? I was refering to theindustrialist robber-barons
How about you wait until Microsoft actually topples from a monopoly psition before using them as an example of how monopolies naturally disappear?
As for lassez faire, the 19th century was well known for its social inequality and brutal working conditions, all of which were at least in part due to this outdated and failed philosophy. It took unions forcing governments to intervene before we did away with lassez faire's lovely legacy of unsafe work conditions, 16 hour work-days, 7 day work-weeks, low pay, and child labor.
The "Hey dude, everything's groovy" attitude of the Common Hippy generally wins out over the "Ima git mah gun!" attitude of the North American Puff-Necked Libertarian. Although combining the two usually results in an unstable hybrid that is liable to snap at any moment under the strain of reconciling the Hippy's "Hey, everybody, let's share" beliefs with the "I got mine, everyone else can go hang," attitude of the Libertarian. Dangers aside, further study of this rare and fascinating hybrid is warranted.
;)
Like I said, I like trolling Libertarians
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, FYI, but nice joke :)
I know all about Stalin, the cultural revolution and the killing fields. Tyrrany under the guise of communism, but that is communism's natural end-point. I'm opposed to communism and any kind of coercive use of power. Protection of private property requires a large amount of state sponsored coercive power. I'm not proposing any kind of top-down, imposed structure, merely advocating for a structure that people could adopt locally, and that would scale well through federation. I'm also stating, that as protection of privately held natural resources requires the threat of state sponsored violence, no anarchist federation need respect the property claims of private holders.
Either you weren't paying attention or I was not stating my position clearly. In any case, I'm glad we seem to have moved beyond invective so we can get to the real meat of the issue.
Learn your history, you freak. I'm an anarchist, the commies hate us as much as they hate the capitalists. Why do you think Trotsky got an icepick in the ear? You have no idea what you're talking about, it's all just "looters who want to take mah propuh-tie!" to you, isn't it?. You're the looter, you fascist propertarian. I'm sure as far as your concerned the whole rest of humanity can go to hell, as long as you've got yours. Selfish sociopathic git. Society made you what you are, it gave you everything you have, including the language you so blithely use to disparage it. Without society you'd be no more than a starving animal. You owe society a debt that can't be measured. So you can take your propertarian nonsense and stick it up your fat ass, you smirking chimp. I tried to have a civil conversation with you and figure out where you disagreed with me, but it appears that all you are capable of is hooting and flinging feces. You obviously aren't smart enough to bother with.
Sssh! I was playing along, now you'll ruin it.
Oh, indeed. I myself enjoy a good troll now and then. GNAA and their ilk may be infantile amateurs, but some of the best trolls on the intarweb still ply these waters. Heck, you almost had me.
;-)
Personally, Libertarians are my favorite target. Hippies are too damn mellow, they're all like, "I support your right to your opinion, man, but I, like, respectfully disagree." Boring. Quote some Proudhon at them and Libertarians are like, "I'm gonna git mah gun and come shoot your dog in the face iff'n you tries to mess with my propuh-tie!" Much more entertaining.
I was all set to be offended, but it's a good laugh. I don't think he's actually dissing hippies here so much as just poking fun. So knock it off with the troll mods. That kind of oppression is so uncool, man, I mean, if we can't laugh at ourselves, we need to smoke more pot, am I right? The dude may be too square to realize that you don't generally get rowdy and smash stuff when you toke up, but that doesn't make him a troll. Come on, mods, don't be like The Man here, putting your negativity onto this poor dude, let him be himself.
Jmorris42, shine on, you crazy diamond.
Private real property requires system of control as well. It needs enforcement by state power to be effective, otherwise we are talking about the tyranny of the strong. You gloss over my main point, that is, private property entails choice theft. Non-property holders have no stake in a system of private property ownership.
The systems I mention would not own property but would manage it on behalf of it's true owners, the people of the world, collectively. I don't have the answers as to where it would exist or how it would exert its influence, as these issues would be decided by the people who's interests are being represented.
Every stakeholder in the system would participate in the decision making process, but exactly how and to what degree isn't up to me, but the citizens of planet earth. Not fetuses or chimpanzees, but even smartass humans would be allowed to vote in these matters, or the system would not be fair and equitable. You are using loaded questions to cast unwarrented aspersions without explainign how our current system doesn't produce the same unwanted outcomes.
As for how the syetm would balance individual desires, that is up to the participants in such a system to decide. Individual ownership of natural resources is theft, not a system of collective control, because a collective system vests control in everyone rather than only property owners.
As for your next set of questions, I will pose one of my own. What choice do non property owners who do not wish to participate in our current system have?
In my proposal, property would be fenced off from those not wanting to participate, because those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources are thieves who are stealing those resources from the rest of us. But I would advocate for a distributed, bottom up style of control where individual groups could take their collective share of property and choose to mediate control through a free market system.
I don't believe any particular person or small group's definition of ethics should be imposed on everyone. But that is what is happening now.
New Hampshire contains nearly six billion acres of land. Your point is moot, though, because if natural resources weren't scarce they wouldn't have any value in our current system.
The Mondragon Collective in Spain is perhaps the best example of a system somewhat similar to mine put into practice on a large scale, although there are admitedly some differences. I leave it up to you to look it up and research it if you are interested.
It should be noted that private property ownership requires violence to enforce it's rules.
Now, how about you answer a question, as neither you nor anyone else I've discussed this with has been willing or able to refute my major points. Just one question, but it is a big one. On what basis do you justify private ownerhsip of natural resources?
She's the one on the right. I kid you not. Bow-chicka-bow-ow! Ms. Williams? I'm here to fix your hot tub. Uh oh, looks like I'm gonna hafta lay some new pipe!
Every other woman listed seems to be active in the game industry today. Roberta is retired, more's the pity. When I was a young geek gamer, I had such a crush on her despite the fact that she's 17 years older than me. Girl geek gamer and hot to boot, what's not to love?
Hehe. If he'd only said "a star" instead of "the sun" he'd still be right, now wouldn't he?
Oh, it's safe to make assumptions about other people's competance. Just do what I do and assume they're incompetant until they prove otherwise.
The free market isn't really so free, is it? Where's my Drug-n-Hooker Mart? That's it, I'm making my own free market, with drugs, and hookers! In fact, forget the free market part. I'm moving to an island someplace and I'm taking all the drugs and hookers with me. All you squares can have fun with your drug-and-hooker-less so-called free market.
You should get that knee looked at, it's jerking pretty hard there. I picture you getting to that line and steam coming out of your ears. First, you realize I'm talking about real property, not personal property, right? And I provide a decent argument as to why real property is theft, which I note you haven't actually tried to refute on its merits, but simply dismissed. Perhaps you have no way of refuting my argument, but can't stand to admit that? Ah, well, you can always lug out the trusty ad hominem, can't you? That'll refute anything! I bet all ten far right conservatives with an IQ under 90 who read slashdot are saying, "Yeeehaw! Y'all done showed him!"
You'll have to do better than that if you want to impress anyone intelligent, right, left or center. Look at my fans list. Like it or not, lots of people here take me seriously. Maybe this bastion of commies and lefties is not really the placed for you, hmmm? Maybe you'd be more comfortable on a site like freerepublic.com, where everyone thinks like you do and pointless ad hominems rule? Obviously you aren't someone who likes having their ideology questioned or their assumptions challenged, and you have a very narrow and limited view of what is considered normal and acceptable discourse, so a site like that would be perfect for someone of your level of intellectual development.
See? Two can play at the ad hominem game, and quite frankly, I think I play it better. But if you'd rather to have a rational discussion, I'll be waiting.
Socialism as a philosophy isn't responsible for 100 million dead. Now who's making up statistics (yes, I was, so I'll admit it here rather than reply to three seperate posts.) Communism can certainly be held responsible for a large number of deaths, but the two are not the same. And I'm neither, I'm an anarchist, like Proudhon, who was the earliest critic of Marx, by the way. You may want to learn a little about history before disdainfully dismissing anyone's philosophy, if only to figure out why it's wrong and better refute it. Or maybe you're just the ad hominem type. Or the type who has found the One True Path and can tolerate no deviance from it.
I gave a good explanation as to why property is theft, and you did nothing to refute my explanation, so we'll try this again. Firstly, I'm talking about real property: land, natural resource, etc. I'm not talking about the fruits of your labor, things you worked on. Those are yours. As I said, I'm no communist. But no one owned any land before some smart guy got the idea of fencing it off, so everyone had the opportunity to use it in a shared fashion. In order to mix your labor with land and have a legitimate right to call it yours, you need to exclude others from it, thus the act of mixing your labor necesarily happens before you have a legitimate claim. It is the same as me stealing a bike, painting it, and calling it my own because I worked on it.
Now, we come to the heart of the argument. The people who you exclude from your property are only getting one thing in exchange for the agreement not to trespass, and that is that you will uphold their claims to property as well. The whole notion of property can only be based on this agreement, justification by so-called natural rights just doesn't fly. I have the natural right to do anything that's in my power to do, including killing you and taking your land. I won't kill you because that is the ultimate choice theft, I have taken away all your possible choices. Owning property is a lesser crime, it takes away the choice to use that property, but it takes it from everyone.
So what do all the non-property holders get in exchange for their agreement not to use your property? Nothing. So they have no ethical reason to honor your request. The only reason they have is the threat of force, and that's not a very good justification in my book.
I see two possible solutions to this dilemma. One, a system that distributes an equitable amount of real property to everyone, so everyone is a party to the contract. Two, a system of democratic control of property where everyone is a party to the contract. To me, these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property.
I've stated my case as clearly as possible. If you think I am wrong-headed here, I ask that you provide a clear argument as to why. As I stated, I'm not an idealist, and if you can provide a convincing argument, I will change my tune in a heartbeat. I've done it before when I've seen that my reasoning is flawed, and I'm sure I'll do it again. So I ask you, where have I gone wrong in my thinking?
Sorry, sorry. I took it the wrong way. My bad. And I love Office Space.
First point: you are right, and this is the hardest part in designing any system! How do you prevent concentration of power. First, everything should be decided by choice and contract. No coercion. But we do have to have laws that keep people from taking away other people's choices unjustly. And I see taking natural resources as a kind of choice theft. Our system of representative democracy provides a good blueprint for a system of checks and balances, but for continued good functioning it needs an educated and involved populace.
Second point: I am talking here about the issue addressed in the well known economic paper that was published in 19790, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" by George Akerlof. Basically, the problem is thus: Buyers and sellers of used cars do not have equal access to information about those cars. Sellers have a motive to overstate the value of their cars, therefore buyers must assume that all used cars are less valuable than stated. This drives down the market value of used cars, which in turn drives the sellers with higher quality cars out of the market, making the problem even worse.
Third point: nobody creates value on their own. They are part of a system. Leaders have no value without followers. Innovators have the cushion of security needed to innovate precisely because the majority of people don't innovate but just do what worked for their ancestors. By overvaluing certain systemic functions such as leadership or innovation, the system encourages people who would not naturally drawn to those roles to do them even though they aren't suited to them. You can't have a system that is all leaders and innovators, it wouldn't work.
As for giving the people wo are good at what they do more control, I agree. excellence should be rewarded, and in fact this fits with most people's sense of fairness. If someone was producing something of value in a system of democratically controlled resources, do you not think that people would vote to give that person greater control?
I work for the state. 'nuff said? But I have been screwed over by small business owners who I thought were my friends, too.
People like you, who work hard, take risks, are good and decent, and provide opportunities for other should be rewarded. I can't stress this enough. I'm not a communist in that regard. But there should be limits to the amount of money and power that anyone is allowed to accumulate, and I wuold put that limit squarely at the point that one person's power and money compromises another person's ability to be free to make their own best choices.
I love rockets. I'm a network admin by trade, specializing in Linux, clusters, HA systems, IBM BladeCenter & VMWare. I do have a job, and it's not bad for being a state job. I've seen worse run IT departments in private companies, actually. I actually wish I had more to do, and a manager who was more involved and gave me a little more direction. As it is, I have a lot of leeway but little satisfaction.
The reason I converse is not to prove I'm right, but rather to find out if.
This is a common belief, but I don't buy it. I've worked the hardest on things I haven't gotten paid for, that I did for love, and I don't feel like I'm exceptional here. In fact, our system devalues intrinsic motivations and replaces them with an artificial punishment/reward system. In a system of distributed wealth/control, people would work hard in order to earn the respect of their peers, to "scratch an itch," to get a desireable mate, to leave a legacy, and simply to feel good. The human animal is driven to excel not from fear, not from some arbitrary desire to get ahead, but from love. Have you never done anything in your life simply because you loved it? Have you never felt the joy that comes from doing an excellent job, or from exceding your own personal best at soemthing? If that's the case, I feel sorry for you, and I mean that. I'm not trying to be condescending. To me, that's the most important part of being human, and the greatest tragedy of capitalism is that it crushes that part of the human spirit.
Estate tax is a good place to start, but I'm an old school anarchist of the Proudhon variety, and I believe that property is theft. Not personal property, but natural resources. There is no justification for fencing off land and taking away other people's freedom to use it. You have to have labored over something before you have a right to call it your own, and you have to own something before you have a right to keep others from using it. Therefore, no one has any justification in holding natural resources as their own.
I have not come up with the perfect solution to this dilemma. As Proudhon also, less famously said, property is also the only real protection against tyranny and is inherently anarchistic because it respects no king or lord. I feel their are two choices, Proudhon's idea of communal control of resources or some form of distributarianism. In communal control there is the plus that the process of deciding on how to use resources is democratic, but without a strong constitution and a system of checks and balances this can lead to a tyranny of the majority. With distributarianism, everyone owns their little portion of the means of production, but who arbitrates this ownership, and how do we ensure that the means are distribuited equitably.
There are many problems with the free market as a system of arbitration. It requires perfect information on the part of all actors to work efficiently. It can not correctly value the costs and benefits of externalities. It does not operate efficiently where the marginal cost of entry into markets is very high (commonly known as a monopoly.) It has no negative feedback cycle to prevent a runaway accumulation of wealth by a few people. The more wealth one has, the easier it is to make more by using your wealth to game the system and ensure their isn't a level playing field. The free market can not think ahead and come up with solutions. It can only say what isn't working, not what might work better, and if what might work better is locked out due to any of the previously mentioned root causes of market failure, we will be stuck with what we have.
We have a system that expects and rewards selfishness. So much so that even though the majority of people have been shown in modern economic experiments to favor fairness and reciprocity over personal gain, they will act selfishly rather than cooperatively because that is what the system rewards. In fact, the system gives free reign to screw over the naturally cooperative (and this is a large part of the reason behind my "bad luck." I'm too nice and too trusting, and I am not willing to sell out that part of myself just to get ahead.)
Remember, your friends, relatives and acquantences are not a random sample of the population. You have probably not met the legions of people for whom the system has not worked, despite their best efforts, so it is no stretch for you to think of those people in the abstract sense, and to believe that they had all the opportunities that you did. It's just easier to think that they are where they are because they are lazy than to feel like you have to change the whole system.