About 60% of the current cost of oil is pure speculation. Check out the following URL for a detailed analysis of that 60% figure.
That doesn't really seem like analysis so much as simple post hoc reasoning about a lack of regulation. The reality remains that the only way futures speculation can affect the final price of a delivered good is if the futures prices change to encourage hoarding. The fact that the futures price is not hugely higher than the spot price and that officially, inventories seem to be falling don't agree with the paper's conclusions.
I'm willing to buy into the idea that there is a lot of hoarding going on that isn't properly accounted for (it certainly wouldn't be surprising), but I haven't seen any good evidence of that claim. If it's true, it changes the market realities a bit, and it's something that we need to figure out how to deal with. If not, I don't see how anybody can come to the conclusion that the current price is speculation without giving in to wishful thinking.
you do understand that the companies refining the oil are purchasing on the futures market right?
Yes, and so does Krugman in the article I linked to.
no refinery in the world gives a shit about the oil price today. they have already bought all the oil they need to have in their facility today many months in advance.
Yes, and they'd do that primarily because the spot price is comparable to or higher than the futures price, so there's no downside to getting the guaranteed delivery price.
therefore the oil going into their production pipeline is being purchased months in advance and as such, they are simply competing with speculators who are buying these futures at the same time and removing these futures from the board. This causes the price of the futures to potentially rise if the refineries are trying to purchase as well.
In that case, the futures price would be higher than the spot price. The only demanders for spot purchases and short run futures contracts are people who actually plan to take delivery of the oil. In the longer term markets, it's a combination of those people and speculators. If speculators drive the long run prices up too high, rational purchasers will lean toward buying shorter run contracts.
if speculators are able to drive the price up, they do not have to wait for the market to drop to sell, they can be slowly pushing the price up by buying the available futures, and when their are none to be had for purchase by users who cant afford to not have it, they are willing to pay the higher price to get it.
All the talk of speculators driving things neglects the simple fact that at the end of every futures contract is a quantity of oil--a quantity that speculators don't want to have to deal with. If speculators are really driving things, the futures prices would be in contango or inventories would be growing. The first is clearly not the case, so where are the inventories? I can't say that I'm keeping track of oil inventories too closely, but I haven't heard anything about any such growth. A market in backwardation combined with static or declining inventories certainly doesn't seem to be one that's being dominated by futures manipulation.
More to the point, the simple fact that the spot price is higher than or comparable to the futures price should be telling us that the people who actually use the oil are willing to pay those prices, so the demand side portion of the equation is very real, regardless of the cause of the swings in the supply side. That should be far more alarming to us than anything that's happening in the long-term futures market.
Oil purchases are all done on the futures market. The futures market is all speculation. Ergo, the current price of oil is speculation of the future demand for oil.
I'm not talking about the price of a contract for delivery three months from now. I'm talking about the price of a contract that's about to come due. If you're a speculator, you likely have no interest in taking delivery of any oil. You'd rather offload that contract to somebody who will actually use the oil. At that point, the price is determined by what oil consumers are actually willing to pay for the oil. If the market is all speculation, odds are pretty good that you'd lose your shirt in that transaction.
There's some debate about what's actually going on, but in the absence of significant evidence of hoarding, I tend to side with Krugman on this one. The data just don't support the speculation story. As somebody else said, it's like saying that the Giants won the Super Bowl because lots of people bet that they would. I think that we're looking at the real price of oil here.
Despite what the media says, the housing crisis is not a national crisis either.
I can only half agree with that. Yes, not every housing market is affected by it significantly. Housing markets are local, but credit markets are national.
Houses are not stocks, they don't fluctuate like that. The prices are falling because of all the foreclosures causing more supply and thus less demand, which in turn causes prices to fall. The problem was simply all the variable rates people were taking and the banks doing too many of these risky loans - the market took a turn and suddenly the banks had to jack up the rates, which causes some foreclosures, which in turn causes the banks to loose money (yes they loose money on a foreclosure because they get a house and not the money back), which cause them to jack up the rates to cover their losses, which cause more foreclosures, etc etc. Now, there was more to it than that, but that's the gist.
The "more to it" part is the speculation about future house prices that caused people to make ridiculously silly decisions about the appropriate price for a house rather than evaluating a sensible price based on economic realities and historical norms. What you're describing is the mechanism causing the bubble to deflate.
Well, I think that as soon as they announce that we will start new drilling out there in previously 'banned' areas...that speculators in oil will begin selling off...and that should drop the prices almost overnight back to more normal levels.
I'd like to hear more about your reasoning on this. How much of the current price of oil do you think is speculation, and by what mechanism is speculation actually affecting the actual delivery price?
I don't know, I would think stopping terrorist from killing another 3000 people on American soil might be the extremely good reason.
That's a good reason for wiretaps and other intelligence gathering. It doesn't seem to be an especially good reason to keep the judiciary out of the loop. I haven't seen any good evidence that removing judges from the system would make any difference except to lessen oversight, given the "hot pursuit" types of allowances that FISA has. If we're going to chip away at the oversight that protects our 4th Amendment rights, I expect to get something significant for it in return. I don't see any evidence that that's the case.
The entire setup was supposed to be like "Echelon" which the courts said is completely legal and all except it has real humans interpreting the suspected code words and alerting people rather then computers.
I know of no Supreme Court cases affirming the legality of echelon or anything like it. Could you be more specific?
Given the specifics of the program, I don't see it as unreasonable in that limited sense of only pertaining to international calls where at least one party to the calls were either known terrorist, suspected terrorist, or had convincing connections to them.
Sound fine to me. Why not have a judge look over that evidence and put a rubber stamp on it, then? Without getting too detailed, I'm afraid that the executive branch has lots its "trust me" privileges as far as I'm concerned.
To put this as bluntly and clearly as possible, when we are at war (which we are), something that would otherwise restrict an administrations powers are superseded by inherent rights, abilities, and obligations that would not have been present without the war.
I'll allow that we're at war, but how broad to those powers become when we're at war? If we're at war with North Korea, does that give the President an automatic pass on surveillance that has nothing to do with North Korea, North Korean operatives, or the war in question? If not, who can we rely on to ensure that he's not abusing that power behind closed doors?
Further, when do the war powers go away? War powers are certainly necessary if we're invaded and we need the executive to solve problems quickly, but are we still at war as long as there's somebody, somewhere, who wants to commit a terrorist act against the US? If that's the definition of war, I think that we need to rethink what types of "temporary" powers we're willing to grant, because we've essentially defined ourselves into a constant state of war.
If you examine all the information available, you can see where it is somewhat reasonable and that there was a good reason for the actions that transpired.
What I'm looking for is:
1) A satisfactory explanation as to why having the courts involved will significantly damage our intelligence gathering capacity.
2) A reasoned discussion of whether or not there are alternatives to giving a single branch of government carte blanche to tap phones based only on their say-so. How is it that there is no possible way to introduce a properly cleared, neutral third party to review the records?
If I see convincing arguments that cover those two, I'll consider the problem real. At this point, all I've seen is an aversion to independent oversight. That's an understandable desire, but not one I'm inclined to indulge.
I know someone is going to say "we don't know that without judicial oversight". You don't know that with judicial oversight either.
No, not for certain, but there are degrees of certainty. I'd sleep better with an independent judiciary making those decisions than I would with elected politicians. That's where legal oversight involving individual rights usually goes, and I'm generally suspicious of the motives of any politician who wants to change that without some extremely good reasons.
Speculation can drive up prices like this temporarily as people buy futures they don't intend to take delivery of, but the reality is that when you buy and take delivery of oil, you have two fundamental options: use it or store it. Krugman explains here.In order to spike the price up and stay up, the speculators will have to engage in one of those activities. If they're burning it, it's not speculation. I don't know of anybody who is storing oil on a large enough scale to explain the price run up we're talking about. So the question is, where are the stockpiles?
He represents Gitmo detainees. He's going to find data that supports his position.
Then we should completely throw out our entire legal system. Both sides are biased, so we should dump their arguments entirely without reading them or looking at the data they reference. There's no way they could possibly illuminate any points that have been missing.
He will also REJECT data that goes counter to his opinions. It would be as if were debating global warming and all I reported was temperatures retrieved in the dead of winter. So, a source must not be involved with the subject.
I think that the original claim was that people were largely not picked up by US soldiers. The paper indicates, based on a raw reading of the declassified reports, that less than 5% were picked up by US soldiers. Nobody, as far as I can find, has disputed that claim, even though the data is available to anybody who wants to read the reports. I'm not asking you to agree with the entire report--I disagree with some of its conclusions and believe that it overreaches in places.
My question is this: Are you suggesting that the 5% figure is likely to be inaccurate? I think that the implication there is that this person fabricated or otherwise manipulated the number and was not called on it? That none of the people who got burned by that claim bothered to check the files and see if it was wrong? If I was experiencing that PR nightmare, you can bet that I'd be able to send a junior grade researcher out to double check every figure in that document and publish a rebuttal. The rebuttals I've seen from the government don't dispute the figures.
Let me try to summarize your comments on bias without pasting the entire thing: NPR has an agenda because some of its non-news programs contain lengthy editorial rants, but Fox News does not have an agenda, but rather is squarely in the ideological center even though some of its non-news programs contain lengthy editorial rants.
Let me explain my experience with news bias and how I deal with it. News reports are unlikely to fabricate things or get facts completely wrong without catching them and correcting them relatively quickly. They are likely to leave details out. When I find that a news report is misleading, it's almost always because there was information that was left out that I ended up getting from another source. A single concrete claim from any mainstream news source is more than likely to be correct, but there may be other pieces of information that are of interest. Analysis by the talking heads on a mainstream news source is more than likely to be a pile of verbal oatmeal from somebody who doesn't deserve a paycheck.
I have no problem accepting anything from NPR to Fox News for concrete claims as likely to be true. I would use multiple sources to piece together the big picture, and I wouldn't listen to a word the analysists say. What I would *not* do is reject concrete claims out of hand because of the news network because of an editorial bias. Ignoring for a moment that you seem to have a keen nose for bias unless the source is one you agree with, I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by doing that. Grab the data and strip out the analysis and do your own thinking. I'm not asking you to accept the conclusions. I'm asking you to look at the data and think about what it means.
I did however look the paper over. It is well written and presents some good points. However, some of the points are dated or just wrong.
I believe that the paper is from 2006. Not that it has any affect on the raw data about the circumstances of the capture of the detainees in question.
Define "meaningful". What non-meaningful opportunities have they had?
Well, all evidence indicates that the CSRTs are not meaingful opportunities to defend themselves, and the CSRTs were all these folks had at the time
And what have these candidates accomplished? One's a brand new senator,...
And a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law school, an accomplished legal scholar, law professor, state politician, and political activist.
...another tried to ride her husband's coattails into office.
After graduating from Yale Law, contributing as a legal scholar, working a successful career at a distinguished law firm, and spending years as a political activist.
The third is a genuine war hero, but has been in the washington bubble so long.
And a graduate of the prestigious Naval Acadamy at Annapolis, a Navy Captain, and an experienced politician. I am not saying that any of these things immediately qualifies somebody to be President, but these are not your average Joes. They're all very accomplished people in their own right. Some past candidates have been more accomplished than others, but the reality is that there are very few serious contenders for the office who don't have some impressive resume points outside of politics.
I agree with most of what you say, but I think you're missing one point. The reason--why would we have no sympathizers in your scenario? Why? Because people are happy with the status quo. Even our poorest live lives only dreamed of by third world people.
I certainly don't disagree entirely, but I don't think that it's as simple as that. We can't just blame poverty for those reactions because it implies that these people have no legitimate gripes about US foreign policy. They do. And what's worse, we're doing a really excellent job of giving propagandists fodder to make their illegitimate gripes look legitimate. That's the real trick. As I said, if you're planning to counter the idea that the US is at war against Islam, it's a good idea to do a serious cost/benefit analysis before invading a Muslim country. Or at least, once you're there, try to do a halfway decent job of running the operation. This is where the "intellectual class" that was kept largely out of the planning and execution of this most recent war becomes a useful asset.
After the war, it still took us 10 year occupation (and with the cooperation of a emperor who in the surrender agreement admitted to his people that he wasn't a deity) to turn them around. (And we only got the surrender after dropping 2 nuclear bombs on them.)
That's a 10 year occupation to rebuild. There was no comparable insurgency reasons you pointed out: The people in charge made some very sensible decisions when it came to understanding and handling the motivations of the people involved. I suspect that if it had been handled like we handled Iraq (let's say we moved in, executed the emperor, and tried to rule by force), they would have been dealing with a similar shit storm. People don't like to be occupied, so if you're going to do it, the analysis of how you'll do it should consist of more than common sense and best case scenario thinking.
One way is unfortuantely because of the American press. I expect the press to report news, but what they've turned into is a propoganda machine for the terrorists.
It wouldn't be so if there wasn't so much bad news. That's the reality. Even the giant liberal media conspiracy wouldn't fabricate stories about large scale civilian deaths and suffering if it weren't happening. More to the point, the Middle East doesn't rely on our press to get information any more. They have their own these days, and theres isn't nearly as sensitive to our point of view as ours. We've reached a point where we can't say one thing and do another, because we will get caught, even if the crazy liberals at CNN and the New York Times play ball.
I don't expect fluffy bunnies and ponies for news, but they go out of their way to report the negative by and large because the
Where did I say that? I meant voluntary donation to the government.
So what happens when (not if) the voluntary funds are insufficient to pay for a police force that does a satisfactory job? As I see it, this could go two ways: 1) The people who are paying decide that they're not getting their money's worth and stop contributing. At that point they either live with the chaos or hire private security firms. 2) The people who are paying demand that the police address their needs over the needs of free riders, and police become a de facto private security force. At that point, your society differs from rule by warlords only in name.
Your entire post shows why anarchy is nonsensical and cannot function.
And your position seems to suggest a world not only where externalities don't exist, but where society is made up of players who will put the interests of society over their own self-interests. In that case, anarchy or pure collectivism work just as well as your proposed society. The whole point of governments and financial systems and private property are to either keep people's selfishness from harming society (e.g. putting robbers behind bars) or harnessing people's selfishness to make society productive (e.g. private property). The assumptions you're making are exactly the same types of assumptions that make communist paradises such crappy places to live.
sorry, but a paper by the lawyer of a Gitmo detainee is not a valid source. If he sites unbiased research then follow the sources he sites and link to them. It's far to easy to cherry pick data to match your predetermined conclusions.
You didn't answer my question. What would you consider a valid source? It seems like all media is right out. Sources that cite the original, publicly available data (and haven't been refuted, as far as I can tell) are right out. What do you suspect is wrong with the paper? Are you concerned that you'll be misled by fabricated numbers or bogus statistics? If so, how come nobody has managed to call them out for it, given that the raw data is available and a lot of people have a strong interest in dispelling it? Are you just worried about getting bias cooties on yourself from reading a source that disagrees with you?
Sorry, but NPR is the most biases source of any organization that considers itself to be unbiased. Ira Glass is vegetarian man from Chicago, now living in NY.
Well, then he couldn't possibly point you toward any useful information. Who do you consider unbiased? Seriously?
I have nothing against vegetarians, NY'ers nor Chicagans...
Of course not, but it doesn't stop you from using those facts to poison the well in the face of what appears to be the best researched set of opinions in the public sphere at the moment. I don't see anybody citing any arguments to the contrary that are backed up with any references at all. The government's response to the SHU paper was, "No, it's better than that. Trust us."
My suggestion: No source is unbiased. Read lots of them and think about what they say instead of expecting a neutral analyst to come to feed you data. It simply will not happen with issues like this.
As for me basing my opinions on a "hunch". Nope. Personal experience. Me saying that soldiers are lazy comes from my own experience as a soldier. If you need a source for that, I'd recommend military.com, but I'm not giving out my real name.
Do you seriously think that my questioning your sources was on the topic of laziness in soldiers and not the actual data we're discussing? My question is this: You're quick to dismiss all of these sources as biased, even though they cite their data and nobody appears to be disputing the numbers, even with the raw data available. What sources are you using that are more reliable? As far as I can tell, you're making your decisions based on thought experiments and declaring any data that contradicts them to be tainted, even though it appears to be the best data we have.
Now I will concede that there are people at Gitmo that don't belong there, like the example you sited. However, I seriously doubt that these guys are being interrogated beyond what it took to verify that they shouldn't be there.
That would be fine if they were actually doing a decent job of getting to the bottom of these cases. The fact that these ridiculous miscarriages of justice exist is a sign that we're not doing enough due diligence to justify holding people for years without trial. Try reading the report all the way through and listening to the program. If it turns you into a vegetarian, I'll give you my real name so you can sue me.
Once this happens, these guys stay until someone can be figured out what to do with them. Not to say that it's not a terrible situation, but should we shut down the US justice system because innocent people have been locked up?
You're presenting a false dilemma. The question is not whether we tear down the whole system and let everybody go. The question is whether we have a duty (both practical and moral) to give people a proper hearing before locking them away. No system is perfect, but it should be abundantly clear from the nature of the screw ups I've d
You seem to have some strong opinions. Did they come from the primary source material? Did you note that the paper in question referenced large volumes of primary source material, and that raw numbers are quoted there? What are your sources? It's easy to dismiss things without thinking about them, but I recommend that you...well...think about them.
As for source two, This American Life (with Ira Glass, right?) NPR?!!??! Sorry, I need an unbiased source.
I'm assuming that all media sources will be biased, then. What would you consider a valid source? Are you just wanking at this point by demanding sources and then dismissing them without supporting your opinions with anything more than a hunch?
I don't think that the Norther Alliance gets a bounty for prisoners they turn over. They turn over prisoners who they think we may get information from, or WE think they have information we need.
You seem to think that the Northern Alliance is some sort of reliable, efficient, honest partner in the war on terror and not a collection of warlords from a country full of complex tribal alliances and rivalries who happened to share our interests in ousting the Taliban. My point is simply this: If only 5% of the people locked up are from sources that you can trust and the rest came in with little or no collaborative evidence, the system is broken.
Either way, it's not like we WANT to keep people at Gitmo or anywhere else. I was a soldier, and trust me, soldiers are lazy!
I'm not doubting that the soldiers on the ground have the best of intentions and make good decisions with the information they're given. I'm arguing that our policy is completely broken. We're talking about a system that produces court moments like this one:
MALIK: Regarding the charge that I worked at several guest houses and offices, what was the work?
JUDGE: I cannot answer that. This is the first time we've seen the evidence. I know nothing more
than what is written here.
MALIK: Same with me. I don't know anything about this. Regarding the charge that I was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden's side -- who saw me?
JUDGE: I donâ(TM)t know.
(That's a court transcript quoted one of the biased and obviously completely false sources that you dismissed out of hand.) And of course, there's this gem:
HITT: And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy's client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all the secret evidence against him. And here's what's in it: nothing.
AZMY: The classified file contains - the Washington Post wrote about it - six statements from military intelligence. That's really what the classified file is. Memos saying "this person was here" or "so-and-so witnessed him..." In Kurnaz's case, there are five or six statements saying, "There's no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or a threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he has
got no connection to Al Qaeda. There's no evidence linking him to the Taliban." Over and over and over again.
HITT: But here's the thing: At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider it. And Kurnaz himself doesn't even know about it. He's declared an enemy combatant; he's still at Guantanamo today.
But wait. There's more. The reason they give for holding him? A friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's 2 years after Kurnaz got picked up.
AZMY: So, setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one's friend does, it's actually preposterous in that a simple Google search or a call to the Germans would have revealed that his f
I keep hearing terms like "rotting" when describing Gitmo detainees, when the fact is, by many reports, they are treated quite well.
I guarantee that if you took me from my family and homeland and held me in a prison without trial for years on end, there is no way of feeding me or amount of religious liberty that could make me consider that "being treated well."
Who would you consider non-biased? The sources for this paper are available. The person who wrote it could be considered biased, but the numbers are taken straight from the detainee files. The people are, by and large, not people who were picked up by US troops on the battlefield.
If you're interested in a broader examination, I recommend the This American Life program on the topic. Transcript and audio can be found here. It has become clear to me that although the people running these things have good intentions, the result is that we're casting a wide net and sweeping up a lot of people without appropriate protections. Kangaroo courts don't count, and I think that the Supreme Court was right to come in and attempt to bring sanity to the process.
Currently, it is taken by force, violating everyone's rights. Ideally, it would be voluntary donated. The whole purpose of the government is to uphold the rights of the citizenry - this is done by the courts and military/police.
And practically, what that means is you have private police forces paid for by a subset of society who have a fiduciary relationship with only those people. The term for that is anarchy. Or rule by gangs. You get all the protection you can buy, and there's no guarantee that you'll use it with the best of intentions. Of course, that problem is solved by other people hiring their own private police forces. It has been the state of things in plenty of places, none of them particularly pleasant. Again, you're long on criticisms and short on proposals and historial perspective.
In an ideal world, everybody donates and things work out great, but in that ideal world, pure collectivism works just as well as the system you're proposing. Everybody always acting with the best of intentions for society as a whole is not a realistic situation.
I'll respond to the rest of your post when I get some more time.
The problem with the popularity of the suggestions is that they usually involve doing work yourself rather than having the government force everyone to change for your own benefit. What it comes down to is simple: many people are willing to disregard rights when it is convenient, but I am not.
No, the problem with your suggestions is that you are proposing anarchy. I'll ask again: Where does the funding for your police force come from?
I have only seen you disregard X by assuming that there was some past problem with it. I haven't seen you actually state what the past problems were with it, nor how those problems justify violating rights. If that information was provided, we might make some progress in the discussion.
You seem to have a lot of opinions on a lot of topics that you haven't studied in any depth that arise simply from assuming that axioms put forward by a set of 16th to 18th-century philosophers are unquestionable dogma. We are still waiting for your city design with multiple sewer systems that would work, much less be an efficient use of resources.
The short answer to your question is to suggest that you study the history of banking a bit. All banking systems involve danger of some sort. I'm thinking that the system closest to the one you'd find acceptable is no banks at all--two people simply enter private contracts with each other and if the borrower doesn't pay the money back, the lender is hosed. Such is life. The problem with this system should be obvious. The lender doesn't have the time to manage enough small loans to spread out the risk, and the risk is too high with a single big loan. The net result is there are few borrowers and practically no credit available.
How about a system where we put our money into the bank, the bank loans it out, takes a share of the interest, and then pays it back to us? Risk is spread out and the bank handles the overhead. So far so good. Problem 1 is that you can't take all of your money out on demand because it has been loaned out to somebody else. Problem 2 is that credit is still largely unavailable as the amount of money people deposit under those circumstances is relatively small. Problem 3 is that the yields on these loans still have to be relatively small for depositors because the bank can't make profits by leveraging the deposits.
Let's move to fractional reserve banking. Now the banks are leveraged 10:1 or so. Lots of money in the system, lots of credit, and benefits all around. The system is a little more exposed to risk from defaults, but regulation can help keep things in check. Bank runs, which can occur in this type of bank and the previous, can be largely by enforcing a deposit insurance system. A runaway money supply and hyperinflation is prevented by mandating a minimum reserve ratio (without which the system absolutely would collapse).
All of this stuff is a matter of managing risk vs reward. Humanity has a rich history of banking system failures and monetary collapses that we learn from. We've arrived at the current solution because it balances the need for easily available credit with relatively low risk when properly managed. Its downside is that it is not self-regulating. The downside to self-regulating systems is that they're practically worthless in the long run. Low yields, low availability of credit, and staggering inefficiency are all prices you pay for such a system, and those systems are not less likely to fail. They're simply less likely to spread failure from one bank to another in some circumstances.
Personally, I recommend coming up with a design for a city with multiple sewer providers that has the hallmarks of a competitive market before tackling this one. Remember, it has to efficiently use resources (space), it has to provide incentive to provide good service to the subscriber after the install (this necessarily means that is should be easy for a sewer subscriber to
Wow and what a bunch of egotistical, elitist tripe. I'm sure the "common man" didn't think much of you looking down your nose at him either, although I seriously doubt you've really dealt with that many.
Are you suggesting that it's a good thing that being elected President is just as much about convincing the average voter that you're just like them as it is about accomplishing things that the average person hasn't? I don't want the average person in the White House any more than I want a person with an average understanding of physiology cutting out my appendix. "I don't know much about the human body, but I came from a background just like you, I'd be fun to have a beer with, and we like the same sports teams" wouldn't cut it for me.
First off you cannot reason with the unreasonable. We've reasoned with North Korea right into them having the time to build a nuclear facility.
If you're trying to apply lessons from North Korea to Al Qaeda, you're not going to get very far. The government of North Korea has recognizable motives, a desire for self preservation, and an understanding of its limits. It's possible to negotiate and work with North Korea without blowing them up. The mistake is in assuming that they'll be an honest partner in those negotiations if it's not in their best interest to do so.
Dealing with Al Qaeda is a different beast, and I think that we've constantly made mistakes in treating them like a nation state that can simply be beaten into submission. The reality is that the truly crazy people of the world, while they can't be negotiated with, are also in the minority. They have a hard time operating in an environment where people don't sympathize with them. If a small cult of Americans decided that they wanted to impose Christianity on the world and were willing to blow up vegetable markets and police stations over it, they'd be done for. Why? No sympathizers. Not possible to recruit people, get funding, or keep secrets. Your neighbors report you to the police and you're gone. We keep those crazy people from being successful by simple virtue of the fact that it's obvious to those around them that they're crazy.
The question we should ask ourselves is how we managed to lose a PR war to a bunch of people who purposefully blow up buses full of civilians. You can't win a war against the idea that Americans are out to destroy Islam by killing the people who espouse that idea. You can't negotiate with those people and convince them that they're wrong, but you can convince the public that they're crazy, and that's what we've been woefully unable to do. All we've managed to do is lend legitimacy to their paranoid fantasies--so much that when they say, "See, they are out to get us! Who's with me?" money and recruits start pouring in.
You can't bomb an idea out of existence when that idea is that you're a military that's out to get people. I think it's time that we stopped using analogies like, "It's just like killing a snake" and start bringing in the "intellectual class" experts on local culture and politics who were ignored during the run up to this failure. If we don't start valuing analysis and expertise over folk wisdom and brute force, I suspect that 100 years in Iraq is optimistic.
Thanks I read a lot of books from both sides and opinions that don't really fall into either side. I also watch the full spectrum of cables news from Left-wing MSNBC to Right-wing FoxNews.
So far so good...
I am very good at uncovering how people think even when they themselves either don't understand their own thought process or refuse to acknowledge why they think a certain way...
Translation: I prefer to ascribe nefarious motives and personal failings to people who disagree with me rather than acknowledging that they may do so for legitimate reasons.
The only problem I have when it comes to understanding people is sarcasm, I rarely pick up when people are being sarcastic. I wonder do you have that problem?
Only on the Internet. I'm a big believer in Poe's law--so much so that I think that it applies far more broadly than its original specification.
But it need not be that way and the whole point of this discussion is to help bring about a different situation.
We're accepting your suggestions.
I'm not proposing a new system. I'm saying that if you think the current system is subject to immense danger, take your money out of the system and only trade with people who agree to also stay out of the system; only then will you be able to avoid the risk. Do that, rather than violate everyone's rights with government regulation - forcing everyone else to change, rather than changing yourself.
All of your discussions seem to go like this:
You: I don't like that we do things this way. Why don't we do X?
Respondant: Because we used to do X and it caused Y problem.
You: But it would be better if we don't do it that way. This is reality and not your crazy theoretical land where we already tried X and it failed.
Respondant: So how do you fix Y problem?
You: [This is where your proposal goes]
I'm not suggesting that our banking system is perfect. I am suggesting that it started as an ineffective and simple system like the one you're proposing and it grew into the one we have today for a host of good reasons that you're not aware of. If your suggestion is to tear it down and start over, I'm not against that, but I do expect some worthwhile suggestion as to what you'd do in place of it and how it does a better job than the system you're proposing now.
That doesn't mean we can't do better. The current system will not improve as long as people keep getting safety nets for bad decisions they make.
That's the sticky point. The "safety nets" in question are both important and dangerous. They're dangerous in the sense that you pointed out: There's moral hazard involved. They're important in the sense that these things take out innocent bystanders, and not addressing the problem is arguably worse than the moral hazard problem.
Do that, rather than violate everyone's rights with government regulation - forcing everyone else to change, rather than changing yourself.
You could stuff your money in a mattress and avoid banking entirely, and you'd still more likely than not end up poor and hungry if the banking system collapses. To put it in terms that you might find more acceptable, your well-being is not the property of the people who are taking the risks, but their risks affect your well being. Short of becoming a subsistence farmer in the mountains somewhere, you can't drop out of the financial system or insulate yourself from the repercussions of its failure. We can either address those problems collectively or ignore them, and historically, ignoring them has not been a good option.
Who is suggesting anarchy? Someone needs to uphold and defend our rights, and that is what the government (through the courts and military/police) is charged with doing.
But taxation is a violation of fundamental rights, right? So you're suggesting that we have courts and police that are paid for voluntarily?
You're attempting to show a direct causal relationship between a single action (or inaction in this case) and massive amounts of rights violations, by ignoring the actions and choices of millions of individuals inbetween.
No, I'm pointing out a very real causal relationship between the failure of a banking system and the consequences of the poverty that results. Banking systems are complex and useful machines that do not evolve into stable, self-regulating entities without external planning. What is in the long-term best interests of a banking system is not necessarily in the best interests of its individual players. It's a very complicated tragedy of the commons situation in which allowing everybody to work in their own individual interest will not result in a stable equilibrium. The people at
You've traded your rights for protection against an emergency that may not have ever come about. Nice, convenient, but not justifiable.
Ever? What about an emergency that would kill 100% of the population and has a 95% chance of happening? What if the right you gave up was the right to chew watermelon bubble gum? There's a 1/20 chance that society would survive without that infringement on that right, so why bother? How... pure.
According to what sources? And how does the lack of a past example show that such a situation is wrong?
How would such a system work, given that there is finite space in the ground, multiple systems would quickly start to interfere with each other, and there's no obvious way of switching providers once you've hooked up with one? How would that system be economically efficient. What you're looking at is a question of how we allocate common resources (the space under ground between our properties). Pure market competition is not necessarily the most efficient way to allocate those resources. Markets can solve a lot of problems, but not all of them.
That is why it is important for everyone at every level, who cares about their money, to know where it is going and how it is being used. Information is the key to stability.
This isn't a question of information. The reality is that nobody knows the future and that fluctuations in market values will happen. We reap a lot of benefits from the system we have now, but one of the end consequences is that the money you deposit is hard to keep track of.
If you don't know enough to be sure that such a "hiccup" could not occur at your bank, you should take your money out of the bank and find somewhere else where you can be sure that they are not riding close to the tipping point.
It's not a question of whether it happens at "your bank" or not. The reality is that a major bank failure affects everybody's bank, and everybody's investments. You can't just walk away from it unless you'd prefer to put your money in a mattress. That's an option, but if everybody did that, we'd be quite a bit poorer than we are today.
If the entire market is so unstable as to be completely susceptible to such a "meltdown", then you should not take part in that market, find like-minded individuals also willing to avoid those risks, and only trade with them. Your mini-market will eventually expand enough that the rest of the market will want to place greater importance on getting good information, so that they can get your business.
What you just described is creating a new banking system and letting it evolve into whatever the market would have it evolve into. That's how we got our current banking system, and it's a pretty darned good system. If you'd like to start your own, that's fine. You'll run into the same problems people ran into over the centuries of banking, and generations from now, you'll probably end up right about where we are here. Unless you have an idea that will solve all of the problems inherent with leverage and investing that also maintains the benefits of those things, you're not going to have many takers.
None of this requires force.
Ah, I forgot to read the rest of your posts. The short answer is that anarchy doesn't work. Governments usually end up forming, and the places where they don't are usually crappy places to live.
And if everyone is making bad decisions, what do you do then?
That's a good question. As I see it, there are two main branches we could take. We could take the principled path and allow a worldwide meltdown of the financial system that makes the Great Depression look like the late 1990s, creates armies of homeless, and kills a bunch of people. Alternately, we could work together to try to solve the problem by any means necessary. The latter may still fail, but I'm not sure that the former sounds like such a good idea.
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I'm willing to buy into the idea that there is a lot of hoarding going on that isn't properly accounted for (it certainly wouldn't be surprising), but I haven't seen any good evidence of that claim. If it's true, it changes the market realities a bit, and it's something that we need to figure out how to deal with. If not, I don't see how anybody can come to the conclusion that the current price is speculation without giving in to wishful thinking.
Yes, and they'd do that primarily because the spot price is comparable to or higher than the futures price, so there's no downside to getting the guaranteed delivery price.
In that case, the futures price would be higher than the spot price. The only demanders for spot purchases and short run futures contracts are people who actually plan to take delivery of the oil. In the longer term markets, it's a combination of those people and speculators. If speculators drive the long run prices up too high, rational purchasers will lean toward buying shorter run contracts.
All the talk of speculators driving things neglects the simple fact that at the end of every futures contract is a quantity of oil--a quantity that speculators don't want to have to deal with. If speculators are really driving things, the futures prices would be in contango or inventories would be growing. The first is clearly not the case, so where are the inventories? I can't say that I'm keeping track of oil inventories too closely, but I haven't heard anything about any such growth. A market in backwardation combined with static or declining inventories certainly doesn't seem to be one that's being dominated by futures manipulation.
More to the point, the simple fact that the spot price is higher than or comparable to the futures price should be telling us that the people who actually use the oil are willing to pay those prices, so the demand side portion of the equation is very real, regardless of the cause of the swings in the supply side. That should be far more alarming to us than anything that's happening in the long-term futures market.
There's some debate about what's actually going on, but in the absence of significant evidence of hoarding, I tend to side with Krugman on this one. The data just don't support the speculation story. As somebody else said, it's like saying that the Giants won the Super Bowl because lots of people bet that they would. I think that we're looking at the real price of oil here.
I know of no Supreme Court cases affirming the legality of echelon or anything like it. Could you be more specific?
Sound fine to me. Why not have a judge look over that evidence and put a rubber stamp on it, then? Without getting too detailed, I'm afraid that the executive branch has lots its "trust me" privileges as far as I'm concerned.
I'll allow that we're at war, but how broad to those powers become when we're at war? If we're at war with North Korea, does that give the President an automatic pass on surveillance that has nothing to do with North Korea, North Korean operatives, or the war in question? If not, who can we rely on to ensure that he's not abusing that power behind closed doors?
Further, when do the war powers go away? War powers are certainly necessary if we're invaded and we need the executive to solve problems quickly, but are we still at war as long as there's somebody, somewhere, who wants to commit a terrorist act against the US? If that's the definition of war, I think that we need to rethink what types of "temporary" powers we're willing to grant, because we've essentially defined ourselves into a constant state of war.
What I'm looking for is:
1) A satisfactory explanation as to why having the courts involved will significantly damage our intelligence gathering capacity.
2) A reasoned discussion of whether or not there are alternatives to giving a single branch of government carte blanche to tap phones based only on their say-so. How is it that there is no possible way to introduce a properly cleared, neutral third party to review the records?
If I see convincing arguments that cover those two, I'll consider the problem real. At this point, all I've seen is an aversion to independent oversight. That's an understandable desire, but not one I'm inclined to indulge.
Speculation can drive up prices like this temporarily as people buy futures they don't intend to take delivery of, but the reality is that when you buy and take delivery of oil, you have two fundamental options: use it or store it. Krugman explains here.In order to spike the price up and stay up, the speculators will have to engage in one of those activities. If they're burning it, it's not speculation. I don't know of anybody who is storing oil on a large enough scale to explain the price run up we're talking about. So the question is, where are the stockpiles?
Then we should completely throw out our entire legal system. Both sides are biased, so we should dump their arguments entirely without reading them or looking at the data they reference. There's no way they could possibly illuminate any points that have been missing.
I think that the original claim was that people were largely not picked up by US soldiers. The paper indicates, based on a raw reading of the declassified reports, that less than 5% were picked up by US soldiers. Nobody, as far as I can find, has disputed that claim, even though the data is available to anybody who wants to read the reports. I'm not asking you to agree with the entire report--I disagree with some of its conclusions and believe that it overreaches in places.
My question is this: Are you suggesting that the 5% figure is likely to be inaccurate? I think that the implication there is that this person fabricated or otherwise manipulated the number and was not called on it? That none of the people who got burned by that claim bothered to check the files and see if it was wrong? If I was experiencing that PR nightmare, you can bet that I'd be able to send a junior grade researcher out to double check every figure in that document and publish a rebuttal. The rebuttals I've seen from the government don't dispute the figures.
Let me try to summarize your comments on bias without pasting the entire thing: NPR has an agenda because some of its non-news programs contain lengthy editorial rants, but Fox News does not have an agenda, but rather is squarely in the ideological center even though some of its non-news programs contain lengthy editorial rants.
Let me explain my experience with news bias and how I deal with it. News reports are unlikely to fabricate things or get facts completely wrong without catching them and correcting them relatively quickly. They are likely to leave details out. When I find that a news report is misleading, it's almost always because there was information that was left out that I ended up getting from another source. A single concrete claim from any mainstream news source is more than likely to be correct, but there may be other pieces of information that are of interest. Analysis by the talking heads on a mainstream news source is more than likely to be a pile of verbal oatmeal from somebody who doesn't deserve a paycheck.
I have no problem accepting anything from NPR to Fox News for concrete claims as likely to be true. I would use multiple sources to piece together the big picture, and I wouldn't listen to a word the analysists say. What I would *not* do is reject concrete claims out of hand because of the news network because of an editorial bias. Ignoring for a moment that you seem to have a keen nose for bias unless the source is one you agree with, I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by doing that. Grab the data and strip out the analysis and do your own thinking. I'm not asking you to accept the conclusions. I'm asking you to look at the data and think about what it means.
I believe that the paper is from 2006. Not that it has any affect on the raw data about the circumstances of the capture of the detainees in question.
Well, all evidence indicates that the CSRTs are not meaingful opportunities to defend themselves, and the CSRTs were all these folks had at the time
And a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law school, an accomplished legal scholar, law professor, state politician, and political activist.
After graduating from Yale Law, contributing as a legal scholar, working a successful career at a distinguished law firm, and spending years as a political activist.
And a graduate of the prestigious Naval Acadamy at Annapolis, a Navy Captain, and an experienced politician. I am not saying that any of these things immediately qualifies somebody to be President, but these are not your average Joes. They're all very accomplished people in their own right. Some past candidates have been more accomplished than others, but the reality is that there are very few serious contenders for the office who don't have some impressive resume points outside of politics.
I certainly don't disagree entirely, but I don't think that it's as simple as that. We can't just blame poverty for those reactions because it implies that these people have no legitimate gripes about US foreign policy. They do. And what's worse, we're doing a really excellent job of giving propagandists fodder to make their illegitimate gripes look legitimate. That's the real trick. As I said, if you're planning to counter the idea that the US is at war against Islam, it's a good idea to do a serious cost/benefit analysis before invading a Muslim country. Or at least, once you're there, try to do a halfway decent job of running the operation. This is where the "intellectual class" that was kept largely out of the planning and execution of this most recent war becomes a useful asset.
That's a 10 year occupation to rebuild. There was no comparable insurgency reasons you pointed out: The people in charge made some very sensible decisions when it came to understanding and handling the motivations of the people involved. I suspect that if it had been handled like we handled Iraq (let's say we moved in, executed the emperor, and tried to rule by force), they would have been dealing with a similar shit storm. People don't like to be occupied, so if you're going to do it, the analysis of how you'll do it should consist of more than common sense and best case scenario thinking.
It wouldn't be so if there wasn't so much bad news. That's the reality. Even the giant liberal media conspiracy wouldn't fabricate stories about large scale civilian deaths and suffering if it weren't happening. More to the point, the Middle East doesn't rely on our press to get information any more. They have their own these days, and theres isn't nearly as sensitive to our point of view as ours. We've reached a point where we can't say one thing and do another, because we will get caught, even if the crazy liberals at CNN and the New York Times play ball.
And your position seems to suggest a world not only where externalities don't exist, but where society is made up of players who will put the interests of society over their own self-interests. In that case, anarchy or pure collectivism work just as well as your proposed society. The whole point of governments and financial systems and private property are to either keep people's selfishness from harming society (e.g. putting robbers behind bars) or harnessing people's selfishness to make society productive (e.g. private property). The assumptions you're making are exactly the same types of assumptions that make communist paradises such crappy places to live.
You didn't answer my question. What would you consider a valid source? It seems like all media is right out. Sources that cite the original, publicly available data (and haven't been refuted, as far as I can tell) are right out. What do you suspect is wrong with the paper? Are you concerned that you'll be misled by fabricated numbers or bogus statistics? If so, how come nobody has managed to call them out for it, given that the raw data is available and a lot of people have a strong interest in dispelling it? Are you just worried about getting bias cooties on yourself from reading a source that disagrees with you?
Well, then he couldn't possibly point you toward any useful information. Who do you consider unbiased? Seriously?
Of course not, but it doesn't stop you from using those facts to poison the well in the face of what appears to be the best researched set of opinions in the public sphere at the moment. I don't see anybody citing any arguments to the contrary that are backed up with any references at all. The government's response to the SHU paper was, "No, it's better than that. Trust us."
My suggestion: No source is unbiased. Read lots of them and think about what they say instead of expecting a neutral analyst to come to feed you data. It simply will not happen with issues like this.
Do you seriously think that my questioning your sources was on the topic of laziness in soldiers and not the actual data we're discussing? My question is this: You're quick to dismiss all of these sources as biased, even though they cite their data and nobody appears to be disputing the numbers, even with the raw data available. What sources are you using that are more reliable? As far as I can tell, you're making your decisions based on thought experiments and declaring any data that contradicts them to be tainted, even though it appears to be the best data we have.
That would be fine if they were actually doing a decent job of getting to the bottom of these cases. The fact that these ridiculous miscarriages of justice exist is a sign that we're not doing enough due diligence to justify holding people for years without trial. Try reading the report all the way through and listening to the program. If it turns you into a vegetarian, I'll give you my real name so you can sue me.
You're presenting a false dilemma. The question is not whether we tear down the whole system and let everybody go. The question is whether we have a duty (both practical and moral) to give people a proper hearing before locking them away. No system is perfect, but it should be abundantly clear from the nature of the screw ups I've d
You seem to have some strong opinions. Did they come from the primary source material? Did you note that the paper in question referenced large volumes of primary source material, and that raw numbers are quoted there? What are your sources? It's easy to dismiss things without thinking about them, but I recommend that you...well...think about them.
I'm assuming that all media sources will be biased, then. What would you consider a valid source? Are you just wanking at this point by demanding sources and then dismissing them without supporting your opinions with anything more than a hunch?
You seem to think that the Northern Alliance is some sort of reliable, efficient, honest partner in the war on terror and not a collection of warlords from a country full of complex tribal alliances and rivalries who happened to share our interests in ousting the Taliban. My point is simply this: If only 5% of the people locked up are from sources that you can trust and the rest came in with little or no collaborative evidence, the system is broken.
I'm not doubting that the soldiers on the ground have the best of intentions and make good decisions with the information they're given. I'm arguing that our policy is completely broken. We're talking about a system that produces court moments like this one:
(That's a court transcript quoted one of the biased and obviously completely false sources that you dismissed out of hand.) And of course, there's this gem:
How do we expect our soldiers to gather evidence for the prosecution while they're being shot at? How do you expect our soldiers to gather evidence at all when they're generally not the ones picking these people up?
Who would you consider non-biased? The sources for this paper are available. The person who wrote it could be considered biased, but the numbers are taken straight from the detainee files. The people are, by and large, not people who were picked up by US troops on the battlefield.
If you're interested in a broader examination, I recommend the This American Life program on the topic. Transcript and audio can be found here. It has become clear to me that although the people running these things have good intentions, the result is that we're casting a wide net and sweeping up a lot of people without appropriate protections. Kangaroo courts don't count, and I think that the Supreme Court was right to come in and attempt to bring sanity to the process.
In an ideal world, everybody donates and things work out great, but in that ideal world, pure collectivism works just as well as the system you're proposing. Everybody always acting with the best of intentions for society as a whole is not a realistic situation.
No problem.
No, the problem with your suggestions is that you are proposing anarchy. I'll ask again: Where does the funding for your police force come from?
You seem to have a lot of opinions on a lot of topics that you haven't studied in any depth that arise simply from assuming that axioms put forward by a set of 16th to 18th-century philosophers are unquestionable dogma. We are still waiting for your city design with multiple sewer systems that would work, much less be an efficient use of resources.
The short answer to your question is to suggest that you study the history of banking a bit. All banking systems involve danger of some sort. I'm thinking that the system closest to the one you'd find acceptable is no banks at all--two people simply enter private contracts with each other and if the borrower doesn't pay the money back, the lender is hosed. Such is life. The problem with this system should be obvious. The lender doesn't have the time to manage enough small loans to spread out the risk, and the risk is too high with a single big loan. The net result is there are few borrowers and practically no credit available.
How about a system where we put our money into the bank, the bank loans it out, takes a share of the interest, and then pays it back to us? Risk is spread out and the bank handles the overhead. So far so good. Problem 1 is that you can't take all of your money out on demand because it has been loaned out to somebody else. Problem 2 is that credit is still largely unavailable as the amount of money people deposit under those circumstances is relatively small. Problem 3 is that the yields on these loans still have to be relatively small for depositors because the bank can't make profits by leveraging the deposits.
Let's move to fractional reserve banking. Now the banks are leveraged 10:1 or so. Lots of money in the system, lots of credit, and benefits all around. The system is a little more exposed to risk from defaults, but regulation can help keep things in check. Bank runs, which can occur in this type of bank and the previous, can be largely by enforcing a deposit insurance system. A runaway money supply and hyperinflation is prevented by mandating a minimum reserve ratio (without which the system absolutely would collapse).
All of this stuff is a matter of managing risk vs reward. Humanity has a rich history of banking system failures and monetary collapses that we learn from. We've arrived at the current solution because it balances the need for easily available credit with relatively low risk when properly managed. Its downside is that it is not self-regulating. The downside to self-regulating systems is that they're practically worthless in the long run. Low yields, low availability of credit, and staggering inefficiency are all prices you pay for such a system, and those systems are not less likely to fail. They're simply less likely to spread failure from one bank to another in some circumstances.
Personally, I recommend coming up with a design for a city with multiple sewer providers that has the hallmarks of a competitive market before tackling this one. Remember, it has to efficiently use resources (space), it has to provide incentive to provide good service to the subscriber after the install (this necessarily means that is should be easy for a sewer subscriber to
If you're trying to apply lessons from North Korea to Al Qaeda, you're not going to get very far. The government of North Korea has recognizable motives, a desire for self preservation, and an understanding of its limits. It's possible to negotiate and work with North Korea without blowing them up. The mistake is in assuming that they'll be an honest partner in those negotiations if it's not in their best interest to do so.
Dealing with Al Qaeda is a different beast, and I think that we've constantly made mistakes in treating them like a nation state that can simply be beaten into submission. The reality is that the truly crazy people of the world, while they can't be negotiated with, are also in the minority. They have a hard time operating in an environment where people don't sympathize with them. If a small cult of Americans decided that they wanted to impose Christianity on the world and were willing to blow up vegetable markets and police stations over it, they'd be done for. Why? No sympathizers. Not possible to recruit people, get funding, or keep secrets. Your neighbors report you to the police and you're gone. We keep those crazy people from being successful by simple virtue of the fact that it's obvious to those around them that they're crazy.
The question we should ask ourselves is how we managed to lose a PR war to a bunch of people who purposefully blow up buses full of civilians. You can't win a war against the idea that Americans are out to destroy Islam by killing the people who espouse that idea. You can't negotiate with those people and convince them that they're wrong, but you can convince the public that they're crazy, and that's what we've been woefully unable to do. All we've managed to do is lend legitimacy to their paranoid fantasies--so much that when they say, "See, they are out to get us! Who's with me?" money and recruits start pouring in.
You can't bomb an idea out of existence when that idea is that you're a military that's out to get people. I think it's time that we stopped using analogies like, "It's just like killing a snake" and start bringing in the "intellectual class" experts on local culture and politics who were ignored during the run up to this failure. If we don't start valuing analysis and expertise over folk wisdom and brute force, I suspect that 100 years in Iraq is optimistic.
Translation: I prefer to ascribe nefarious motives and personal failings to people who disagree with me rather than acknowledging that they may do so for legitimate reasons.
Only on the Internet. I'm a big believer in Poe's law--so much so that I think that it applies far more broadly than its original specification.
We're accepting your suggestions.
All of your discussions seem to go like this:
You: I don't like that we do things this way. Why don't we do X?
Respondant: Because we used to do X and it caused Y problem.
You: But it would be better if we don't do it that way. This is reality and not your crazy theoretical land where we already tried X and it failed.
Respondant: So how do you fix Y problem?
You: [This is where your proposal goes]
I'm not suggesting that our banking system is perfect. I am suggesting that it started as an ineffective and simple system like the one you're proposing and it grew into the one we have today for a host of good reasons that you're not aware of. If your suggestion is to tear it down and start over, I'm not against that, but I do expect some worthwhile suggestion as to what you'd do in place of it and how it does a better job than the system you're proposing now.
That's the sticky point. The "safety nets" in question are both important and dangerous. They're dangerous in the sense that you pointed out: There's moral hazard involved. They're important in the sense that these things take out innocent bystanders, and not addressing the problem is arguably worse than the moral hazard problem.
You could stuff your money in a mattress and avoid banking entirely, and you'd still more likely than not end up poor and hungry if the banking system collapses. To put it in terms that you might find more acceptable, your well-being is not the property of the people who are taking the risks, but their risks affect your well being. Short of becoming a subsistence farmer in the mountains somewhere, you can't drop out of the financial system or insulate yourself from the repercussions of its failure. We can either address those problems collectively or ignore them, and historically, ignoring them has not been a good option.
But taxation is a violation of fundamental rights, right? So you're suggesting that we have courts and police that are paid for voluntarily?
No, I'm pointing out a very real causal relationship between the failure of a banking system and the consequences of the poverty that results. Banking systems are complex and useful machines that do not evolve into stable, self-regulating entities without external planning. What is in the long-term best interests of a banking system is not necessarily in the best interests of its individual players. It's a very complicated tragedy of the commons situation in which allowing everybody to work in their own individual interest will not result in a stable equilibrium. The people at
How would such a system work, given that there is finite space in the ground, multiple systems would quickly start to interfere with each other, and there's no obvious way of switching providers once you've hooked up with one? How would that system be economically efficient. What you're looking at is a question of how we allocate common resources (the space under ground between our properties). Pure market competition is not necessarily the most efficient way to allocate those resources. Markets can solve a lot of problems, but not all of them.
It's not a question of whether it happens at "your bank" or not. The reality is that a major bank failure affects everybody's bank, and everybody's investments. You can't just walk away from it unless you'd prefer to put your money in a mattress. That's an option, but if everybody did that, we'd be quite a bit poorer than we are today.
What you just described is creating a new banking system and letting it evolve into whatever the market would have it evolve into. That's how we got our current banking system, and it's a pretty darned good system. If you'd like to start your own, that's fine. You'll run into the same problems people ran into over the centuries of banking, and generations from now, you'll probably end up right about where we are here. Unless you have an idea that will solve all of the problems inherent with leverage and investing that also maintains the benefits of those things, you're not going to have many takers.
Ah, I forgot to read the rest of your posts. The short answer is that anarchy doesn't work. Governments usually end up forming, and the places where they don't are usually crappy places to live.
That's a good question. As I see it, there are two main branches we could take. We could take the principled path and allow a worldwide meltdown of the financial system that makes the Great Depression look like the late 1990s, creates armies of homeless, and kills a bunch of people. Alternately, we could work together to try to solve the problem by any means necessary. The latter may still fail, but I'm not sure that the former sounds like such a good idea.