Choice is not always a good thing. Would you be better off if you had a "choice" of different voltages and socket types for your various household appliances?
Uh, you don't travel much, do you? North America is about the only place in the world with consistent voltage and plug (and lightbulb, and mobile and TV, etc.) formats.
You missed kurisuto's original question : are you better off because of that ? No, it's an unnecessary hassle.
As someone who moved to OS X after 13+ years on Linux, I can tell you that not having to deal with this "choice" is quite refreshing. A single, coherent and well documented API is much more useful than two half-finished, poorly documented ones.
The move to llvm (and its heavy sponsoring) was because gcc was too monolithic to make it evolve the way they needed in XCode (accessing the code parser for instance, or having separate code generation backends). I doubt they cared much about the license in this case, since gcc 4.2 is still shipped with XCode.
I haven't commented on slashdot in a long while, but this post should never have made it frontpage.
Having read both Greene's op-ed piece on the NY Times, and John Horgan's article, I find the latter much more questionable. Horgan criticizes multiverse theories on purely subjective grounds, and basically thinks that science nowadays should care about real issues first, something no serious scientific researcher would ever support.
Greene's op-ed article is a very good vulgarisation of theoritical physics, I have to wonder what is wrong with it. Seems like the poster has a big chip on his shoulder against Greene for some reason.
Thinking like this is a sure way to add more and more constraining checks and complicated processes, which very quickly become huge hindrances. All this because you ignore the fact that programmers are humans, and humans make mistakes.
I'd rather acknowledge that bugs are bound to happen, and make their detection as quick as possible, and their fixing as easy as possible.
I've yet to meet one which wasn't american (and one which didn't have the political perspective of a goldfish, then again that's the case of most americans today).
There's a point beyond which forcibly keeping someone alive is just as egotistic and cruel as getting rid of someone we no longer consider fit to live.
There is no need of government police. Private security works well for the few malcontents.
No. Having governmental police and justice is an absolute necessity. If people are allowed to punish those who hurt them, you inevitably get into a revenge-driven cycle of violence in which each party retaliates in turn against the other. The only way to break that is by having a neutral 3rd party which lays the punishment on the offender, i.e. a police force. That's why there's been such a thing as soon as the first ruling bodies were created : communities which didn't create any simply self-destructed. Read René Girard's "Violence and the Sacred" for a more thorough description of this.
BTW, the Right to bear arms is something very much local to the US, most of the rest of the world does fine without it. Your culture on economics and history doesn't seem to go much beyond the last 20 years of US history.
One fact you cannot deny: Any airline with a proven quality and safety record could charge a premium, just like Compaq or Apple computers, and people will pay it.
OK, name one company with such a "proven quality and safety record" ? You probably can google this out, but how easy will it be to find the info ? Will it be available through a mainstream channel ? Doubtful. What most people will base their airline ticket purchase decision is not a "proven quality and safety record", it's advertisment.
Corporations today don't sell products, they sell dream, lifestyle, in short : brands. The quality of the product is generally irrelevant.
All the study does is prove Ludwig von Mises' axiom that every government intervention causes problems which spawn more government interventions to "fix", which cause more problems, ad infinitum
Right, and the US got out of the 29 economic crisis without any government intervention whatsoever.
It may come to you as a shock, but there is a middle ground between no government at all and Stalinian USSR.
Resources are scarce. They're limited. We do not have unlimited resources.
Seriously, what's the color of the sky on your planet ? Energy is no longer scarce. Neither is food. Of course they are not infinite, but certainly not scarce.
All of these services are made possible by people working. Unfortunately, people cannot work more than 24 hours a day, so these resources are limited (scarce)
Riiight. And all these routers have little people in them working their asses off to quickly duplicate the packets. Perhaps I should think about feeding the little fairy in my HD who nicely copies all those files for me.
That's funny, most of those statistics made statements about the current state of affairs, and did not compare the plight of the poor today to their plight in the past.
I think this one is revealing enough, even though you disagree :
For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980].
Certainly nothing noted a reverse trend
So these countries should consider themselves happy that their progress is only slowing, since after all it's not going back ?
All of the wealthiest countries had the least restrictive trade laws, and all of the poorest countries had the most restrictive trade laws, funny how that works. And what's more, the countries with less regulated economies were more wealthy. I wonder what that means.
That in the past 20 years, the IMF destroyed the economy of those countries, precisely by opening them to international competition, which means for instance that countries which were able to feed themselves no longer can because we're literally forcing them to buy the surplus of our agriculture. And as I said in an other post, the US has is very protectionist toward importations, thus has restrictive trade laws.
Also, I think it's funny when people say that the world produces enough food for all it's people, and yet many go hungry
Less restrictive trade laws would help this problem because it would allow producers in countries with too much food to sell to people in the countries with too little food.
That's precisely what's currently happening, and what keeps these countries in perpetual assisted state.
I think you'd see their unemployment rate come down if they cut some of their social programs.
No, we'd see criminality and poverty go up. Our social programs can certainly be made more effective (as they clearly don't work properly), but not by cutting them down (as the example of northern europeean countries shows).
Now we just need to figure out a way to get the food to everybody. Capitalism worked for the first half of the equation, and it can and will work for the second half.
But I don't agree with wealth redistribution, or protectionist government government subsidies.
Well I'm afraid reality disagrees with you. BTW, the US are one of the most protectionist governments, and an often cited reason of the lack of economical growth in the EU is because we're not protectionist enough, therefore can't compete with cheap goods produced by China (among others).
Then, if you look at the EU, or the UN, you can see where the inefficiency really starts to come into play.
I can't comment on the UN, however considering the circumstances, the EU is doing quite well, even though it has lots of room for improvement.
Because the US is much more diverse than any one country in the EU
I doubt this is true anymore, but let's leave that aside.
The best solution is leaving more power in the hands of local government, and giving less power to the federal government.
Well on that I will agree with you, heavy centralised government can't be efficient, and many things should be delegated to localities.
Beyond that, you want to leave as little to the government as possible, to allow for as much personal freedom as possible, as well as to promote efficiency.
Personal freedom (nor market freedom) doesn't imply global efficiency, not without regulation, and not in every domain, precisely because people (or companies) never take the big picture into account (like long term or wider consequences), and moreover in a competitive world they can't, because those who do are less competitive.
That's why poor peasants would rather grow drugs rather than cereals since it will make them more money (even though in the big picture it means that it hurts other countries which in turn will fight them), a poor kid in a ghetto will rather sell drugs than trying to get a job (if he ever can get one) because getting caught is an acceptable risk, even though it means it increases criminality rates thus helps maintaining the whole neighborhood in poverty, an oil firm will rather use old tankers because oil spills are an acceptable risks even though sooner or later they create ecological disasters which turn out to cost more to the community, etc...
It's a simple 'game theory' thing. You're company A, B is your competitor. Each of you has two choices : being "community friendly" (say using modern tankers for instance), or not (using old rusted ones with complaisance flags and under-paid untrained crew).
If you choose to be nice, and B chooses to be nice, you both have minimal gain. But if you choose NOT to be nice, while B chooses to be nice (i.e. you cheat), you have maximal gain, while B looses. And if you both cheat, you also have minimal gain.
So what happens ? You want maximal gain, so you'll choose to cheat. But B knows that as well, so B *expects* you to cheat (just like, in turn, you expect him to), so B is forced into cheating as well. So the only equilibrium you can reach is the lowest possible one, where everybody is hurt, including the community.
Are you serious ? An increasingly larger part of the economy is about services, digital goods, information, etc... things which by definition are not scarce, quite the contrary they are infinitely abundant. Even food is abundant, except that it's hoarded and over-consumed by a minority of the world population. The only really scarce resources are things like oil, minerals, and the environment itself.
The important thing is that fewer people loose under capitalism.
The government of the united states bails people out all the time, using bankruptcy protection.
But it can't do that systematically, or the economy would collapse.
As the number of skilled workers increase, overall productivity will increase
Except there is no correllation between productivity and employment. France has the highest per-worker productivity rate in the world, with a 10% unemployment rate which has been remaining constant for 3 decades now.
With more resources being produced, fewer people will go without resources
Then explain how come half of the world is starving, even though we already do produce enough food to feed everybody ?
I'm sorry but you're really parroting dated capitalist dogma here. The myth that the market self-equilibrates to an ideal position is proven wrong every day, even though proponents of the free market keep claiming that the reason is because governments interfere and that the markets should be even less regulated (just like communists kept claiming the reason communist countries were failing was because they weren't communist enough - it's just another form of dogma).
It's part of the US culture to think of the government as big and inefficient. It's not the case everywhere (most of the countries doing the best in the EU have "nanny states", even the UK to some measure), and again you can't give all public services to companies which only concern is their own bottom line and not the public interest, you end up with a much lower quality of service (rolling blackouts for instance). It's true that bureaucracy is hard to avoid, but some governments manage to have rather efficient public services, a balance can be reached.
No. It simply means that economic growth is assumed
Yes, but overall you still have a situation where people are competing over a resource which is scarce by design, so some are bound to lose. BTW in case you haven't noticed, I'm not talking specifically about the fed reserve or anything else local to the US, I'm talking about the capitalist system as it works world-wide. And the Fed (or any government) can't bail people out except as an exceptional measure, otherwise the dollar wouldn't be worth anything.
Yes, but since everyone is skilled, they make more money
Right, and that there are more skilled workers doesn't diminish their market value at all. Off-shoring ?
You've got to think of the big picture to understand what I'm talking about
Perhaps you could take this advice as well, don't you think ?
The thing is that it doesn't matter because only the person or institution that takes out the loan is obligated to pay it back.
That doesn't change the fact that since more money is due than the existing amount, some people are bound to go bankrupt, therefore our currency system implies poverty.
And btw, what if that person is your employer ? Or your main customer ?
This is basically a restatement of the anti-industrialist mantra. If jobs are made obsolete, there will be no more jobs, and everyone will die
What has this got to do with what I said ? If you don't have cheap labor, a lot of goods would be more expensive, therefore less people would be able to buy them, etc... less money circulates, the economy slows. I'm talking about the fact that cheap labor is vital to our system, you respond with job obsolescence. What's the connection ? Of course automation makes people more productive, and precisely helps driving labor cost down. Nobody's arguing against that.
Wouldn't that perpetuate the problem of unskilled labour by making it easer to be unskilled?
*sigh*. OK, I give up. This is becoming embarassing.
"The money that is created when you get a mortgage loan is actually created out of nothing at that point. The bank will credit your account for $100,000, and the money did not exist the minute before you were credited. That is when the money is created.
Every dollar that you've ever seen, whether it is the physical bills or the money in a bank account, has its origin somewhere as a loan to someone through the banking system. That's the origin of money."
Given the guy's credentials on the subject, and having read some of his stuff where he backs this up with historical facts, I'm more inclined to believe him that you:-).
So I figured I would make, as you did, an equally broad, blanket statement about you and assume that you and everyone else in the world does absolutely nothing to help other people.
Fair enough. Scale that to the whole country then. Do you think, on the whole, that people would willingly finance infrastructure like roads or energy production plants, welfare, social security, hospitals, schools, scientific research, arts ? It's true that some wealthy people do, but on the average they don't, or not to the level needed by such endeavors. And how would all these worthy causes be introduced to people ? Through ad campaigns like any product ? That would make for fun commercial breaks.
I certainly hope not. The world would have to be in terrible shape for that to occur.
Er, what shape do you think the world is in, exactly ?:-)
Soros, Stiglitz, Lietaer... I wish I could dig up this recent report about an economist claiming in front of economic students that capitalism had turned into the same kind of dogma that communism once was, as people supporting it always respond to the problems it causes by saying that it's because it's badly implemented, and that the solution is more capitalism (just like communists used to say).
Ah, OK, so you mean to say that you don't give money to charity. I do.
Come on, what kind of cheap insult is that ? I do give to charity as well. Does the charity market even remotely approaches the car market for instance ? No, the priority of everybody is always oneself, and nobody is able to accurately assert the needs of the country on a global scale, thus decide on his own what causes really need to be financed and to what level.
Just like the priority of private companies are always their own bottom line. It's essential to have this incentive and some amount of competition, but you can't let it drive everything either, because the equilibrium it reaches can only be the worst possible one.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, you don't travel much, do you? North America is about the only place in the world with consistent voltage and plug (and lightbulb, and mobile and TV, etc.) formats.
You missed kurisuto's original question : are you better off because of that ? No, it's an unnecessary hassle.
As someone who moved to OS X after 13+ years on Linux, I can tell you that not having to deal with this "choice" is quite refreshing. A single, coherent and well documented API is much more useful than two half-finished, poorly documented ones.
The move to llvm (and its heavy sponsoring) was because gcc was too monolithic to make it evolve the way they needed in XCode (accessing the code parser for instance, or having separate code generation backends). I doubt they cared much about the license in this case, since gcc 4.2 is still shipped with XCode.
(damn, forgot to log in)
I haven't commented on slashdot in a long while, but this post should never have made it frontpage.
Having read both Greene's op-ed piece on the NY Times, and John Horgan's article, I find the latter much more questionable. Horgan criticizes multiverse theories on purely subjective grounds, and basically thinks that science nowadays should care about real issues first, something no serious scientific researcher would ever support.
Greene's op-ed article is a very good vulgarisation of theoritical physics, I have to wonder what is wrong with it. Seems like the poster has a big chip on his shoulder against Greene for some reason.
Thinking like this is a sure way to add more and more constraining checks and complicated processes, which very quickly become huge hindrances. All this because you ignore the fact that programmers are humans, and humans make mistakes.
I'd rather acknowledge that bugs are bound to happen, and make their detection as quick as possible, and their fixing as easy as possible.
because all this applies to humans as well :-)
I've yet to meet one which wasn't american (and one which didn't have the political perspective of a goldfish, then again that's the case of most americans today).
... and pr#6 to reboot.
*sigh*. Those were the days...
Just for the fun of it, I've written a quick reply : http://www.telegraph-road.org/writings/linux_deskt op.html
There's a point beyond which forcibly keeping someone alive is just as egotistic and cruel as getting rid of someone we no longer consider fit to live.
Gotta like this one, if only for the term it uses : http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html#rushkoff
:-)
I wish I'd seen it when I had this discussion.
There is no need of government police. Private security works well for the few malcontents.
No. Having governmental police and justice is an absolute necessity. If people are allowed to punish those who hurt them, you inevitably get into a revenge-driven cycle of violence in which each party retaliates in turn against the other. The only way to break that is by having a neutral 3rd party which lays the punishment on the offender, i.e. a police force. That's why there's been such a thing as soon as the first ruling bodies were created : communities which didn't create any simply self-destructed. Read René Girard's "Violence and the Sacred" for a more thorough description of this.
BTW, the Right to bear arms is something very much local to the US, most of the rest of the world does fine without it. Your culture on economics and history doesn't seem to go much beyond the last 20 years of US history.
One fact you cannot deny: Any airline with a proven quality and safety record could charge a premium, just like Compaq or Apple computers, and people will pay it.
OK, name one company with such a "proven quality and safety record" ? You probably can google this out, but how easy will it be to find the info ? Will it be available through a mainstream channel ? Doubtful. What most people will base their airline ticket purchase decision is not a "proven quality and safety record", it's advertisment.
Corporations today don't sell products, they sell dream, lifestyle, in short : brands. The quality of the product is generally irrelevant.
All the study does is prove Ludwig von Mises' axiom that every government intervention causes problems which spawn more government interventions to "fix", which cause more problems, ad infinitum
Right, and the US got out of the 29 economic crisis without any government intervention whatsoever.
It may come to you as a shock, but there is a middle ground between no government at all and Stalinian USSR.
Scarce means limited.
From the Webster : Not plentiful or abundant; in small quantity in proportion to the demand; not easily to be procured; rare; uncommon.
You do understand that a resource can be limited in absolute terms, yet abundant, I hope.
The US really is not protectionist against imports, I'm not sure why you are under this impression.
If you weren't your deficit would be even worse, even though your current government firmly believes that "deficit doesn't matter".
http://www.china.org.cn/english/BAT/82415.htm
Seriously, what's the color of the sky on your planet ? Energy is no longer scarce. Neither is food. Of course they are not infinite, but certainly not scarce.
All of these services are made possible by people working. Unfortunately, people cannot work more than 24 hours a day, so these resources are limited (scarce)
Riiight. And all these routers have little people in them working their asses off to quickly duplicate the packets. Perhaps I should think about feeding the little fairy in my HD who nicely copies all those files for me.
That's funny, most of those statistics made statements about the current state of affairs, and did not compare the plight of the poor today to their plight in the past.
I think this one is revealing enough, even though you disagree :
Certainly nothing noted a reverse trend
So these countries should consider themselves happy that their progress is only slowing, since after all it's not going back ?
All of the wealthiest countries had the least restrictive trade laws, and all of the poorest countries had the most restrictive trade laws, funny how that works. And what's more, the countries with less regulated economies were more wealthy. I wonder what that means.
That in the past 20 years, the IMF destroyed the economy of those countries, precisely by opening them to international competition, which means for instance that countries which were able to feed themselves no longer can because we're literally forcing them to buy the surplus of our agriculture. And as I said in an other post, the US has is very protectionist toward importations, thus has restrictive trade laws.
Also, I think it's funny when people say that the world produces enough food for all it's people, and yet many go hungry
Do you know anything about the 3rd world problems ? http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/TWN031704.cf
Less restrictive trade laws would help this problem because it would allow producers in countries with too much food to sell to people in the countries with too little food.
That's precisely what's currently happening, and what keeps these countries in perpetual assisted state.
I think you'd see their unemployment rate come down if they cut some of their social programs.
No, we'd see criminality and poverty go up. Our social programs can certainly be made more effective (as they clearly don't work properly), but not by cutting them down (as the example of northern europeean countries shows).
Now we just need to figure out a way to get the food to everybody. Capitalism worked for the first half of the equation, and it can and will work for the second half.
Capitalism in its current implementation is making things worse, and it can be made better.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/soros.htm
and http://www.transaction.net/money/book/ since I've referred to it quite a lot.
But I don't agree with wealth redistribution, or protectionist government government subsidies.
Well I'm afraid reality disagrees with you. BTW, the US are one of the most protectionist governments, and an often cited reason of the lack of economical growth in the EU is because we're not protectionist enough, therefore can't compete with cheap goods produced by China (among others).
Then, if you look at the EU, or the UN, you can see where the inefficiency really starts to come into play.
I can't comment on the UN, however considering the circumstances, the EU is doing quite well, even though it has lots of room for improvement.
Because the US is much more diverse than any one country in the EU
I doubt this is true anymore, but let's leave that aside.
The best solution is leaving more power in the hands of local government, and giving less power to the federal government.
Well on that I will agree with you, heavy centralised government can't be efficient, and many things should be delegated to localities.
Beyond that, you want to leave as little to the government as possible, to allow for as much personal freedom as possible, as well as to promote efficiency.
Personal freedom (nor market freedom) doesn't imply global efficiency, not without regulation, and not in every domain, precisely because people (or companies) never take the big picture into account (like long term or wider consequences), and moreover in a competitive world they can't, because those who do are less competitive.
That's why poor peasants would rather grow drugs rather than cereals since it will make them more money (even though in the big picture it means that it hurts other countries which in turn will fight them), a poor kid in a ghetto will rather sell drugs than trying to get a job (if he ever can get one) because getting caught is an acceptable risk, even though it means it increases criminality rates thus helps maintaining the whole neighborhood in poverty, an oil firm will rather use old tankers because oil spills are an acceptable risks even though sooner or later they create ecological disasters which turn out to cost more to the community, etc...
It's a simple 'game theory' thing. You're company A, B is your competitor. Each of you has two choices : being "community friendly" (say using modern tankers for instance), or not (using old rusted ones with complaisance flags and under-paid untrained crew).
If you choose to be nice, and B chooses to be nice, you both have minimal gain. But if you choose NOT to be nice, while B chooses to be nice (i.e. you cheat), you have maximal gain, while B looses. And if you both cheat, you also have minimal gain.
So what happens ? You want maximal gain, so you'll choose to cheat. But B knows that as well, so B *expects* you to cheat (just like, in turn, you expect him to), so B is forced into cheating as well. So the only equilibrium you can reach is the lowest possible one, where everybody is hurt, including the community.
resources are scarce
p and it's showing no sign of improvement, quite the contrary.
Are you serious ? An increasingly larger part of the economy is about services, digital goods, information, etc... things which by definition are not scarce, quite the contrary they are infinitely abundant. Even food is abundant, except that it's hoarded and over-consumed by a minority of the world population. The only really scarce resources are things like oil, minerals, and the environment itself.
The important thing is that fewer people loose under capitalism.
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.as
The government of the united states bails people out all the time, using bankruptcy protection.
But it can't do that systematically, or the economy would collapse.
As the number of skilled workers increase, overall productivity will increase
Except there is no correllation between productivity and employment. France has the highest per-worker productivity rate in the world, with a 10% unemployment rate which has been remaining constant for 3 decades now.
With more resources being produced, fewer people will go without resources
Then explain how come half of the world is starving, even though we already do produce enough food to feed everybody ?
I'm sorry but you're really parroting dated capitalist dogma here. The myth that the market self-equilibrates to an ideal position is proven wrong every day, even though proponents of the free market keep claiming that the reason is because governments interfere and that the markets should be even less regulated (just like communists kept claiming the reason communist countries were failing was because they weren't communist enough - it's just another form of dogma).
I suppose the true mark of genius (I'm clearly too thick to understand) is how that manages to apply to all cases.
Hint : money circulates.
It's part of the US culture to think of the government as big and inefficient. It's not the case everywhere (most of the countries doing the best in the EU have "nanny states", even the UK to some measure), and again you can't give all public services to companies which only concern is their own bottom line and not the public interest, you end up with a much lower quality of service (rolling blackouts for instance). It's true that bureaucracy is hard to avoid, but some governments manage to have rather efficient public services, a balance can be reached.
No. It simply means that economic growth is assumed
Yes, but overall you still have a situation where people are competing over a resource which is scarce by design, so some are bound to lose. BTW in case you haven't noticed, I'm not talking specifically about the fed reserve or anything else local to the US, I'm talking about the capitalist system as it works world-wide. And the Fed (or any government) can't bail people out except as an exceptional measure, otherwise the dollar wouldn't be worth anything.
Yes, but since everyone is skilled, they make more money
Right, and that there are more skilled workers doesn't diminish their market value at all. Off-shoring ?
You've got to think of the big picture to understand what I'm talking about
Perhaps you could take this advice as well, don't you think ?
The thing is that it doesn't matter because only the person or institution that takes out the loan is obligated to pay it back.
That doesn't change the fact that since more money is due than the existing amount, some people are bound to go bankrupt, therefore our currency system implies poverty.
And btw, what if that person is your employer ? Or your main customer ?
This is basically a restatement of the anti-industrialist mantra. If jobs are made obsolete, there will be no more jobs, and everyone will die
What has this got to do with what I said ? If you don't have cheap labor, a lot of goods would be more expensive, therefore less people would be able to buy them, etc... less money circulates, the economy slows. I'm talking about the fact that cheap labor is vital to our system, you respond with job obsolescence. What's the connection ? Of course automation makes people more productive, and precisely helps driving labor cost down. Nobody's arguing against that.
Wouldn't that perpetuate the problem of unskilled labour by making it easer to be unskilled?
*sigh*. OK, I give up. This is becoming embarassing.
Care to elaborate ?
l es/taking-the-mystery.html
:-).
http://www.newdimensions.org/online-journal/artic
"The money that is created when you get a mortgage loan is actually created out of nothing at that point. The bank will credit your account for $100,000, and the money did not exist the minute before you were credited. That is when the money is created.
Every dollar that you've ever seen, whether it is the physical bills or the money in a bank account, has its origin somewhere as a loan to someone through the banking system. That's the origin of money."
Given the guy's credentials on the subject, and having read some of his stuff where he backs this up with historical facts, I'm more inclined to believe him that you
So I figured I would make, as you did, an equally broad, blanket statement about you and assume that you and everyone else in the world does absolutely nothing to help other people.
:-)
Fair enough. Scale that to the whole country then. Do you think, on the whole, that people would willingly finance infrastructure like roads or energy production plants, welfare, social security, hospitals, schools, scientific research, arts ? It's true that some wealthy people do, but on the average they don't, or not to the level needed by such endeavors. And how would all these worthy causes be introduced to people ? Through ad campaigns like any product ? That would make for fun commercial breaks.
I certainly hope not. The world would have to be in terrible shape for that to occur.
Er, what shape do you think the world is in, exactly ?
Really? By who?
Soros, Stiglitz, Lietaer... I wish I could dig up this recent report about an economist claiming in front of economic students that capitalism had turned into the same kind of dogma that communism once was, as people supporting it always respond to the problems it causes by saying that it's because it's badly implemented, and that the solution is more capitalism (just like communists used to say).
Ah, OK, so you mean to say that you don't give money to charity. I do.
Come on, what kind of cheap insult is that ? I do give to charity as well. Does the charity market even remotely approaches the car market for instance ? No, the priority of everybody is always oneself, and nobody is able to accurately assert the needs of the country on a global scale, thus decide on his own what causes really need to be financed and to what level.
Just like the priority of private companies are always their own bottom line. It's essential to have this incentive and some amount of competition, but you can't let it drive everything either, because the equilibrium it reaches can only be the worst possible one.