They cannot be used to pay taxes, and they cannot be used to pay off liabilities (courts will not recognize a liability paid off if it's paid off in gold). Furthermore, for a long period of time, The State criminalized the holding of gold for monetary purposes, and only allowed for its holding for personal (jewelery) uses. Rothbard wrote on this in What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Err, sorry for the sometimes "mean" content of my post. From the quotes, it appears that at times, I was harsh (I didn't mean to be harsh against you, but the positivists).
Responding to your questions...
" so how do you know what's an a priori axiom and what's not? For thousands of years it was thought that the parallel postulate was thought to be a self-evident a priori axiom. There are things that appear to be self evident, but really aren't. This is why we need emperical verification.
An a priori axiom is a statement which cannot be denied without self-contradiction. In other words, it is "self-evident". This does not mean it is easy to understand, or inherently simply, or that it is psychologically self-evident.
Also, I believe that the parallel postulate still is a self-evident a priori axiom, in it's appropriate context -- a two-dimensional world, or a three-dimensional world with no warping of the space-time continuum. We have simply discovered that that axiom is not perfectly applicable in this universe. Furthermore, our verstehen of non-euclidian geometry rests upon our understanding of euclidian geometry. Also, non-euclidean geometry also starts from a priori axioms. Of course,there is a link between euclidean geometry and non-euclidean geometry: euclidean geometry is simply a special case of non-euclidean geometry in which there is no space-time warping. Quoting Mises:
"
The critics of apriorism refer to the fact that for the treatment Of certain problems recourse to one of the non-Euclidian geometries appears more convenient than recourse to the Euclidian system. The solid bodies and light rays of our environment, says Reichenbach, behave according to the laws of Euclid. But this, he adds, is merely "a fortunate empirical fact." Beyond the space of our environment the physical world behaves according to other geometries.[3] There is no need to argue this point. For these other geometries also start from a priori axioms, not from experimental facts. What the panempiricists fail to explain is how a deductive theory, starting from allegedly arbitrary postulates, renders valuable, even indispensable, services in the endeavors to describe correctly the conditions of the external world and to deal with them successfully."
"Depends on what you mean by action. I could claim that trees act. From an objective viewpoint men and trees both just minimize their free energy, an action by a tree is not fundamentally different from an action by a man. Therefore anything you derive from this action axiom must also hold for trees."
I am referring to the praxeological definition of action. To clarify this definition, I refer to Mises:
"
Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life."
Action is clearly distinct from reaction, which is what you're discussing when you talk about trees. Furthermore, human reflexes, unconscious breathing, blinking, digestion, and the beating of the heart are reaction.
"
I didn't mean to argue about the nature of truth, but the nature of science. I'm not sure that even science can tell us for certain that something is true, only that we have a reasonably good model. Scientists make mistakes. When I said economics is philosophy, I did not deny that philosophy can be useful. Indeed, in situations when experimentation is not possible, it's our only way of deriving something approximating the truth."
For this, I suggest the aforementioned Socials Sciences and Natural Sciences. Science too rests on some a priori axioms. Most basically, causality. We cannot empirically verify causality. If you don't already posses
You don't know what you're talking about. Simply stating that we're better off now -- a time when we have fiat money -- than we were when we didn't have fiat money does not demonstrate that fiat money is superior to gold. The sheer idiocy of a such a statement makes me wonder how you could state it (obviously ignoring improving technology). Yes, we are better off now than we were a hundred years ago. But that doesn't demonstrate the superiority of fiat money.
Are we better off (to the extent that we're better off) because of fiat money? That is, if not for fiat money, we would be worse off today.
Are we better off (to the extent that we're better off) despite fiat money? That is, if not for fiat money, we would be better off today.
Are we better off (to the exten that we're better off) neither because of nor despite fiat money? That is, whether or not there was fiat money, we would be the same as we are today.
1. There are substitutes for gold. Obviously, if gold were used as money, it would be uneconomical to use it as computer parts.
2. As Rothbard explains, a "commodity basket" is extremely flawed and utopian in the worst sense: it simply cannot work.
3. You do not understand the nature of money. Any given quantity of money is just as good as any other quantitity of money. The commodity chosen as the monetary unit will simply scale to the appropriate value. You also subscribe to typical fallicious beliefs about "deflation". Deflation is not falling prices (or rising purchasing power of the dollar). Deflation is a decrease in the monetary base; inflation is an increase in the monetary base. Printing out dollar bills is inflation. Burning them is deflation.
4. No Austrian who favors eliminating fiat money and replacing it with a commodity-backed standard (gold) supports fractional reserve banking.
Firstly, it is morally bad. It is thievery. Inflation involves theft from property owners, as crooks (the government) print out more than one title to the same property.
Secondly, inflation isn't uniform, and could never be uniform. Inflation redirects wealth from productive voluntary private-sector activities, to anti-productive coercive State-activities, like war.
It is impossible to do experiments in the social sciences, because there are always numerous variables which you cannot control. You also don't understand the nature of reasoning from a priori axioms. We don't need empirical evidence to know that a priori axioms are true. Mises correctly states that all economics follows from the action axiom (and other axioms and postulates): The action axiom states that man acts. Expanding upon this, man acts using various ends to obtain various means, so as to ease and unease felt. You cannot dispute this axiom, for attempting to dispute it is in fact an action itself.
Your reasoning is positivist, which is debunked junk. Positivism states that we can only know something is true if we have empirical verification, and that everything else is meaningless. This is inherently self-contradictory, for that very statement can only be taken as an a priori axiom. Except, according to positivists, a priori axioms are meaningless tautologies. So, the question is, how do we know that that positivist statement is in fact true? We haven't verified it by experiments, so according to its own declaration, it is a meaningless tautology.
Austrian economists start from self-evident a priori axioms. These axioms do not need to be empirically verified. Indeed, they cannot be falsified empirically, and can only be illustrated. You cannot falsify the action axiom. You can only illustrate it (indeed, everything you do is an illustration of the action axiom).
"
What makes these axioms self-evident?... They are self-evident because one cannot deny their truth without self-contradiction; that is, in attempting to deny them one would actually, implicitly, admit their truth." -- Hoppe, Hans-Herman
If you want to read more on Austrian economics, the best introduction is Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market.Rothbard, Murray. (MES). Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market was Rothbard's treatise on economics, also intended to be a textbook for introducing students to Austrian economics. Mises, Rothbard's mentor, wrote the great treatise on economics simply called Human Action.Mises, Ludwig von. (HA). Human Action is an extremely important treatise, although it is not as easily understandable as Rothbard's treatise. Rothbard, in his treatise, assumes that readers have much of the knowledge in Human Action, so reading MES is not a substitute for reading Human Action; however, Rothbard corrects Mises on a couple of issues (like monopoly) and expands upon Mises' analysis, exploring new categories.
Patents are the fault of the State, not Microsoft. Even Bill Gates at one point expressed concerns about software patents. As for compatability problems, that is *still* a choice of users. MS shouldn't have to sell their product the way you arrogantly determine they "should". That is a violation of their property rights. Also, last time I checked, there's something called Wine and VMWare. Furthermore, F/OSS developers have done a pretty good job of dealing with MS-formats.
Your post illustrates a typical pattern that Ludwig von Mises noted: Interventionism leads to more Interventionism. What we should do is just allow the free market to function, unhampered by regulations from aloof idiots hundreds of miles away in D.C. MS has been given various advantages by State Interventions in the free market -- such as the artificial creation of scarcity in patents. The correct course of action is not to add more regulations and increase the power of the State (which in-and-of itself is a bad thing), but to eliminate the initial State-interventions (patents and copyrights).
RayServer.com, among many many other examples of places that sell computers either without an OS or with Linux, or the OS of your choice. Buy it online and have it shipped to you, and quit your fucking bitching.
Are just whining by inefficient competitors who simply can't compete through the voluntary method of competition -- by producing better products at lower prices that consumers want to buy -- those choose the coercive, political method of "competition": whining to The State.
Firstly, MS is a company, and as such is the private property of it's shareholders, who should be able to sell their products on any terms they want. They aren't coercively forcing anyone to buy their products. If you don't like their stuff, dont' buy it. End of discussion.
Secondly, the argument that there's no alternative is also bullshit. There are numerous vendors that offer to install GNU/Linux, and there are individuals who'll do that for money. E.g., RayServers. Furthermore, contracts between OEMs and MS to only sell their computers with MS Windows installed are voluntary private contracts that violate the rights of no-one. OEMs have the right to sell their PC's however they like to. No-one has the right to prevent them from only putting MS software on their PC's, or force them to put anythign on there that they don't want to. Doing such -- first and foremost -- is a violation of their property rights, which is also a violation of freedom of association (which really boils down to property rights).
Regarding "predatory pricing" in particular, it is the most ridiculous and idiotic idea that anyone's ever come up with. To make a law protecting us from "predatory pricing" is really no different than making a law protecting us against "unicorns" or "witches" -- things that simply don't exist. Of course, that doesn't stop the witch-hunt.
What price-cutting refers to is cutting prices below the level of any competitors to drive them out of business, and then afterwards raising prices to extremely high levels. This, of course, is total humbug. If any of you think this is a good idea, try suggesting it to an executive at your company. You'll be laughed out of the company. Any company that tried doing such a thing would go bankrupt, because companies cannot operate on a loss for a sustained period of time (and it would take a sustained period of time to drive competitors out of business). Furthermore, the second part -- that they can then just raise prices to be very high -- is flatly wrong, since that would encourage competitors to enter the field, thus forcing them to lower their prices or go out of business. In reality, such a scheme has never been implemented in the real world, and never will, because it is impossible. See Monopoly and Competition.
Nash was wrong. Life is not a game. We never know when our turn is up. People often find ways to break out of the game. And the only people who behave as game-theory predicts they would are game-theoreticians.
Human beings are not objects. We have free will, the ability to choose. All that any such searching for patterns would be doing is searching for patterns in the historical past -- that is, it would be the act of categorizing history. In the social sciences, there are no fixed relations. See Social Science and Natural Science.
It is almost certain that for any random 10 lines of code you pick -- in any software program -- there is going to be some sort of patent-violation, because there's so many patents in software, the vast majority of them for ridiculous things.
How many patent violations are there in proprietary code, violations that no-one can see, due to the closed nature of the code?
So, GNOME has decided to take a more simple approach. How is this a bad thing? Does every desktop/WM out there have to cater to hard-core Linux geeks? If your an advanced user, there are plenty of advanced windows managers and desktops for you. KDE has options and configurability up the wazoo. KDE too bloated? You can use Ion, or Pwm, along with Xfce. You can also use WindowMaker, OpenBox, BlackBox, and a plethora of others WMs and desktops.
Personally, I think GNOME is going in a good direction, though I still like Ion and WindowMaker. A few things that GNOME could use would be a way to allow for easy arrangement of windows (tile, cascade, tile horizontally, tile vertically), and/or for an option to automatically arranged windows like Ion.
Gentoo is an excellent example of the effects of good documentation. Gentoo has one of the most user-unfriendly installations that exists. I mean, it is worse than Debian, and Debian's supposed to be considered a nightmare. Almost all installation and setup in Gentoo is at the command-line.
Now, if it wasn't for Gentoo's superb documentation, the number of people who have Gentoo installed would be in the hundreds (if that) not the thousands. Because of Gentoo's excellent documentation, it is possible for a newbie to GNU/Linux (if he knows his hardware) to install Gentoo on his computer.
Without excellent documentation (and very helpful forums), does anyone really think that anyone other than hard-core developers would be capable of installing Gentoo on their computers?
That paragraph about users "reading the source-code for documentation" is the most idiotic thing I've ever read in my life. Unfortunately for you, you had to group it along with a series of intelligent comments above it. Did your brain just crap out that paragraph? I wish I had my moderator points still, because I'd rate this as over-rated.
different solutions for different problems
on
OpenBSD 3.5 Reviewed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If you are running a server, and security is extremely important, there is nothing better than OpenBSD. Period, end of discussion. Banks and financial institutions should not be using Windows, Linux, or even FreeBSD servers: they should be using OpenBSD servers. Likewise for any website online trafficking in sensitive financial information and private information.
For websites that don't deal in such sensitive information, OS' that are less secure are acceptable, such as FreeBSD and various Linux' suitable for servers (Slackware, Debian, Gentoo).
For Desktop users, security isn't as paramount. However, it is still important, especially if you store any sensitive information on your computer. Some people store their private financial information on their computers. This is why Windows creates problems. Other Windows security problems are just obvious: the plethora of virus', exploits, worms, etc etc etc. These are areas where Linux is better (if not misconfigured so as to be insecure). The reason for Linux and not OpenBSD is because computer's are not an end in themselves. They exist to do certain functions; many of the daily things which people want to do on their computers just aren't possible to do on OpenBSD, or are a real pain, but are possible to do in Linux.
Stating people should use Windows, MacOS, Linux, or xBSD is over-general. Do you know precisely what every users' needs/desires are? No. Then how can you possibly say what OS they should use? The answer is you can't.
Of course, I haven't really responded to your question "if security's such a BFD, why isn't BSD more popular around here?" The answer is that security isn't considered paramount, above all else. If you wanted to be completely secure with your computer, you could unplug it from the internet and never plug it back in, and lock it up in a vault-room, with finger-print protection. People here probably consider other things important as well...
Yuck, the fact that you're forced to navigate directories in Mac OS SUCKS. Fortunately, they have the Apple menu, but those retards did away with that in OSX, where the Apple Menu doesn't include a list of most programs. Navigating through menus is much quicker than navigating through a file-system.
Obviously, Microsoft thought they were going to lose this case, otherwise they wouldn't have given Lindows $20 million. I'm hard-pressed as to why they even bothered to begin with: is acquiring the Lindows.com domain and having Lindows change their name to Linspire really going to make/save Microsoft $20 million? Chalk it up as a decision I'd be really disappointed in if I was a shareholder, an outright waste of Shareholder's Equity.
However, it's a big win for Lindows. They get $20 million just for changing their domain name and company name. It's pretty clear that MS would have lost this case. You don't get trademarks to everything that even sounds like what you have a trademark to.
As a libertarian, I'm against trademarks, tradesecrets, patents, and copyrights to begin with. See the following articles:
But taxes are arbitrary. Simply because they are established by "law" doesn't mean they aren't arbitrary. The "law" you refer to is nothing more than the declaration of a bunch of crooks to clearly organize acts of mass-theft, like a mafia-organization.
Furthermore, the first part of the 17th article is "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others." If someone can take one of your possessions away against you will, then it is not really your property (unless it's being taken away because you committed a crime and are obligated to make restitution to the victim).
If we wanted to have a universal declaration by which to judge all societies, we could put it in one sentence:
No-one shall initiate aggression against anyone else, and the initiation of aggression shall be a crime.
Any action which involves the initiation of aggression against someone else -- whether performed by individuals acting alone, or acting in concert via the State -- is a criminal act. Simply because the UN and US agree on something doesn't mean it's not arbitrary (determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle).
The entire thing is also hopelessly vague.
Furthermore, you haven't addressed the main problem with this bullshit, which is that it demands something which is impossible except in a very highly technological society. Certainly, none of the vast array of "positive rights" that this worthless doctrine lays out can be achieved by State actions (initiating aggression against individuals); they can only be accomplished, in the future, by allowing the free market to operate without hamperence.
Simply because a bunch of crooks (and these people are all crooks, as their salary is provided for by robbery and thievery at the tax-payer's expense) get together and write down this crap doesn't make it true, morally correct, or legally correct by natural law. The Nazi's also got together and wrote a whole bunch of "laws", as well. Most of this, if we were forced to adhere to it, would necessitate initiating aggression against others, either against their person or their property. Employers would be forced to hire people they don't want to hire on terms they don't voluntarily agree to, for example. It is morally bankrupt.
Let's go over this bunk in detail...
Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
All fine and good.
Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Since most the "rights and freedoms set forth" in this article are arbitrary and wrong, this is also wrong (albeit, if the rest of the declaration weren't bunk, it would be true). The problem here is with the idea that man can legislate the morality of right and wrong, and of what we should and should not be prevented from doing by force. For this robs the meaning of the word "should", as if there's anything that we think we "shouldn't" do, we can just draw up some legislating saying that we can and should be able to do it.
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
For the most part fine, so long as it is properly understood. My right to life means I can take measures to preserve my life and protect myself from criminals. It does not mean I can steal from anyone else or initiate aggression against an
We all know that rich people don't necessarily understand much about economics. Warren Buffet, for example, doesn't fundamentally understand what causes a business cycle. He's brilliant at finding quality companies that are under-valued, but one skill doesn't imply the other. Of course, Buffet knows the proximal causes of a crash (the mass over-valuing of business' and of various product-lines), but he doesn't know the ultimate cause (what causes those factors, which is what Austrians like Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard have explained).
Also consider John Maynard Keynes, who had an exceptional record as an investor, following Benjamin Graham's principles. Keynes was a terrible economist, and his idiotic non-sense has been responsible for much misery in the past century.
That if we ever want to come anywhere near to accomplishing all of the things that the UDHR calls for (and indeed, if society can provide for all those things on a voluntary, not coerced, basis that would be an accomplishment), then the fastest way to make such a possibility is to allow the free market to work, absent State-intervention which hampers progress and prevents prices from lowering (e.g., inflation).
These are just a bunch of arbitrary declarations. I could just as easily arbitrarily declare "everyone has the right to drive a Mercedes Benz". What hogwash.
The UDHR is nothing but an arbitrary hodge-podge of semi-libertarian beliefs (which is ok), mixed in with socialist non-sense, like the "right to a job". The worthless thing is even self-contradictory (articles 23, 24, 25, 26, and any other articles asserting positive, as opposed to negative, rights contradict article 17). I could criticize this junk in detail, but sufficed to say it is socialist crap.
It mandates violating personal and property rights, since these positive rights can only be secured by either taxing (stealing) from some people, violating individual's property rights (by forcing them to employ people on terms they would not do of their own free will), or simply enslaving doctors (since everyone has the "right" to health-care).
The worthlessness of this doctrine can be understood once you realize that the demands it makes could only possibly be achieved in a highly technological society; in other words, philosophically, it is worthless, as it cannot apply for any non-technological society.
Sorry, but that is not an argument against my position. Either you can try to make a rational argument, or not. But simply saying that all of my links are from the same website shows nothing (especially since they're from different authors). If I had linked to those articles from the author's home-pages, you would have nothing to say.
I also could have linked to many books from Amazon.com covering the same topic. It just happens to be that Mises.org provides a vast array of books and articles online for free. After all the whining on/. about "information just wants to be free", I'd think people would be happy that there's a website offering up hundreds of books (many of them 1000s of pages or more), essays, videos, and even audio-lectures all for free.
Your understanding of monopoly is flawed. A monopoly occurs when one company is granted priviledges by the State, such that competitors cannot enter the market-place. This has been the case with various utilities companies. However, simply because one company has obtained a large market-share does not make them a monopoly, by the true definition of the word. Nor should their property rights be violated.
You also don't understand competition in the free market. It is not some violent affair, like a bully dominating smaller kids. Competitors compete with eachother to obtain the patronage of consumers. Consumers can choose which companies to patronize, of their own free will. No company has the right to make a profit. Nor, really, do consumers have the right to demand anything of producers. Nor do producers (like MS) have the right to demand anything from anyone else. Everyone has the right to either engage in a voluntary transaction or not to. All that this anti-trust crap is about is MS' competitors whining because consumers are apparently choosing MS' products over theirs.
If you don't like MS, you're welcomed not to buy their products. Competitors are welcomed to compete against them and produce better products. What you shouldn't be normatively entitled to do is to violate MS' property rights because you don't like them. Grow up.
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They cannot be used to pay taxes, and they cannot be used to pay off liabilities (courts will not recognize a liability paid off if it's paid off in gold). Furthermore, for a long period of time, The State criminalized the holding of gold for monetary purposes, and only allowed for its holding for personal (jewelery) uses. Rothbard wrote on this in What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Responding to your questions...
" so how do you know what's an a priori axiom and what's not? For thousands of years it was thought that the parallel postulate was thought to be a self-evident a priori axiom. There are things that appear to be self evident, but really aren't. This is why we need emperical verification. An a priori axiom is a statement which cannot be denied without self-contradiction. In other words, it is "self-evident". This does not mean it is easy to understand, or inherently simply, or that it is psychologically self-evident.
Also, I believe that the parallel postulate still is a self-evident a priori axiom, in it's appropriate context -- a two-dimensional world, or a three-dimensional world with no warping of the space-time continuum. We have simply discovered that that axiom is not perfectly applicable in this universe. Furthermore, our verstehen of non-euclidian geometry rests upon our understanding of euclidian geometry. Also, non-euclidean geometry also starts from a priori axioms. Of course,there is a link between euclidean geometry and non-euclidean geometry: euclidean geometry is simply a special case of non-euclidean geometry in which there is no space-time warping. Quoting Mises:
"Depends on what you mean by action. I could claim that trees act. From an objective viewpoint men and trees both just minimize their free energy, an action by a tree is not fundamentally different from an action by a man. Therefore anything you derive from this action axiom must also hold for trees."
I am referring to the praxeological definition of action. To clarify this definition, I refer to Mises:
Action is clearly distinct from reaction, which is what you're discussing when you talk about trees. Furthermore, human reflexes, unconscious breathing, blinking, digestion, and the beating of the heart are reaction.
" I didn't mean to argue about the nature of truth, but the nature of science. I'm not sure that even science can tell us for certain that something is true, only that we have a reasonably good model. Scientists make mistakes. When I said economics is philosophy, I did not deny that philosophy can be useful. Indeed, in situations when experimentation is not possible, it's our only way of deriving something approximating the truth."
For this, I suggest the aforementioned Socials Sciences and Natural Sciences. Science too rests on some a priori axioms. Most basically, causality. We cannot empirically verify causality. If you don't already posses
Are we better off (to the extent that we're better off) because of fiat money? That is, if not for fiat money, we would be worse off today.
Are we better off (to the extent that we're better off) despite fiat money? That is, if not for fiat money, we would be better off today.
Are we better off (to the exten that we're better off) neither because of nor despite fiat money? That is, whether or not there was fiat money, we would be the same as we are today.
I would suggest you read Facts and Counterfacts in Economics. Hülsmann, Jörg Guido.
1. There are substitutes for gold. Obviously, if gold were used as money, it would be uneconomical to use it as computer parts.
2. As Rothbard explains, a "commodity basket" is extremely flawed and utopian in the worst sense: it simply cannot work.
3. You do not understand the nature of money. Any given quantity of money is just as good as any other quantitity of money. The commodity chosen as the monetary unit will simply scale to the appropriate value. You also subscribe to typical fallicious beliefs about "deflation". Deflation is not falling prices (or rising purchasing power of the dollar). Deflation is a decrease in the monetary base; inflation is an increase in the monetary base. Printing out dollar bills is inflation. Burning them is deflation.
4. No Austrian who favors eliminating fiat money and replacing it with a commodity-backed standard (gold) supports fractional reserve banking.
Secondly, inflation isn't uniform, and could never be uniform. Inflation redirects wealth from productive voluntary private-sector activities, to anti-productive coercive State-activities, like war.
Thirdly, inflation causes the business cycle.
Your reasoning is positivist, which is debunked junk. Positivism states that we can only know something is true if we have empirical verification, and that everything else is meaningless. This is inherently self-contradictory, for that very statement can only be taken as an a priori axiom. Except, according to positivists, a priori axioms are meaningless tautologies. So, the question is, how do we know that that positivist statement is in fact true? We haven't verified it by experiments, so according to its own declaration, it is a meaningless tautology.
Austrian economists start from self-evident a priori axioms. These axioms do not need to be empirically verified. Indeed, they cannot be falsified empirically, and can only be illustrated. You cannot falsify the action axiom. You can only illustrate it (indeed, everything you do is an illustration of the action axiom).
I would suggest reading the following papers:- Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. Mises, Ludwig von.
- What is Austrian Economics? Mises.org
- Economic Science and the Austrian Method. Hoppe, Hans-Herman.
- Realism and Abstraction in Economics: Aristotle and Mises versus Friedman. Long, Roderick.
If you want to read more on Austrian economics, the best introduction is Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. Rothbard, Murray. (MES). Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market was Rothbard's treatise on economics, also intended to be a textbook for introducing students to Austrian economics. Mises, Rothbard's mentor, wrote the great treatise on economics simply called Human Action. Mises, Ludwig von. (HA). Human Action is an extremely important treatise, although it is not as easily understandable as Rothbard's treatise. Rothbard, in his treatise, assumes that readers have much of the knowledge in Human Action, so reading MES is not a substitute for reading Human Action; however, Rothbard corrects Mises on a couple of issues (like monopoly) and expands upon Mises' analysis, exploring new categories.Praxeology and Understanding. Selgin, George.
In Defense of "Extreme Apriorism". Rothbard, Murray.
Your post illustrates a typical pattern that Ludwig von Mises noted: Interventionism leads to more Interventionism. What we should do is just allow the free market to function, unhampered by regulations from aloof idiots hundreds of miles away in D.C. MS has been given various advantages by State Interventions in the free market -- such as the artificial creation of scarcity in patents. The correct course of action is not to add more regulations and increase the power of the State (which in-and-of itself is a bad thing), but to eliminate the initial State-interventions (patents and copyrights).
RayServer.com, among many many other examples of places that sell computers either without an OS or with Linux, or the OS of your choice. Buy it online and have it shipped to you, and quit your fucking bitching.
Are just whining by inefficient competitors who simply can't compete through the voluntary method of competition -- by producing better products at lower prices that consumers want to buy -- those choose the coercive, political method of "competition": whining to The State.
See Price Gouging Saves Lives, by David M. Brown.
Secondly, the argument that there's no alternative is also bullshit. There are numerous vendors that offer to install GNU/Linux, and there are individuals who'll do that for money. E.g., RayServers. Furthermore, contracts between OEMs and MS to only sell their computers with MS Windows installed are voluntary private contracts that violate the rights of no-one. OEMs have the right to sell their PC's however they like to. No-one has the right to prevent them from only putting MS software on their PC's, or force them to put anythign on there that they don't want to. Doing such -- first and foremost -- is a violation of their property rights, which is also a violation of freedom of association (which really boils down to property rights).
Thirdly, anti-trust laws are nonsense. See The Case Against All Antitrust Legislation and The Truth About Sherman by Thomas DiLorenzo:
I would also suggest Monopoly and Competition from Murray Rothbard's treatise on economics, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market .
Regarding "predatory pricing" in particular, it is the most ridiculous and idiotic idea that anyone's ever come up with. To make a law protecting us from "predatory pricing" is really no different than making a law protecting us against "unicorns" or "witches" -- things that simply don't exist. Of course, that doesn't stop the witch-hunt.
What price-cutting refers to is cutting prices below the level of any competitors to drive them out of business, and then afterwards raising prices to extremely high levels. This, of course, is total humbug. If any of you think this is a good idea, try suggesting it to an executive at your company. You'll be laughed out of the company. Any company that tried doing such a thing would go bankrupt, because companies cannot operate on a loss for a sustained period of time (and it would take a sustained period of time to drive competitors out of business). Furthermore, the second part -- that they can then just raise prices to be very high -- is flatly wrong, since that would encourage competitors to enter the field, thus forcing them to lower their prices or go out of business. In reality, such a scheme has never been implemented in the real world, and never will, because it is impossible. See Monopoly and Competition.
Nash was wrong. Life is not a game. We never know when our turn is up. People often find ways to break out of the game. And the only people who behave as game-theory predicts they would are game-theoreticians.
Human beings are not objects. We have free will, the ability to choose. All that any such searching for patterns would be doing is searching for patterns in the historical past -- that is, it would be the act of categorizing history. In the social sciences, there are no fixed relations. See Social Science and Natural Science.
It is almost certain that for any random 10 lines of code you pick -- in any software program -- there is going to be some sort of patent-violation, because there's so many patents in software, the vast majority of them for ridiculous things.
How many patent violations are there in proprietary code, violations that no-one can see, due to the closed nature of the code?
So, GNOME has decided to take a more simple approach. How is this a bad thing? Does every desktop/WM out there have to cater to hard-core Linux geeks? If your an advanced user, there are plenty of advanced windows managers and desktops for you. KDE has options and configurability up the wazoo. KDE too bloated? You can use Ion, or Pwm, along with Xfce. You can also use WindowMaker, OpenBox, BlackBox, and a plethora of others WMs and desktops.
Personally, I think GNOME is going in a good direction, though I still like Ion and WindowMaker. A few things that GNOME could use would be a way to allow for easy arrangement of windows (tile, cascade, tile horizontally, tile vertically), and/or for an option to automatically arranged windows like Ion.
Now, if it wasn't for Gentoo's superb documentation, the number of people who have Gentoo installed would be in the hundreds (if that) not the thousands. Because of Gentoo's excellent documentation, it is possible for a newbie to GNU/Linux (if he knows his hardware) to install Gentoo on his computer.
Without excellent documentation (and very helpful forums), does anyone really think that anyone other than hard-core developers would be capable of installing Gentoo on their computers?
That paragraph about users "reading the source-code for documentation" is the most idiotic thing I've ever read in my life. Unfortunately for you, you had to group it along with a series of intelligent comments above it. Did your brain just crap out that paragraph? I wish I had my moderator points still, because I'd rate this as over-rated.
If you are running a server, and security is extremely important, there is nothing better than OpenBSD. Period, end of discussion. Banks and financial institutions should not be using Windows, Linux, or even FreeBSD servers: they should be using OpenBSD servers. Likewise for any website online trafficking in sensitive financial information and private information.
For websites that don't deal in such sensitive information, OS' that are less secure are acceptable, such as FreeBSD and various Linux' suitable for servers (Slackware, Debian, Gentoo).
For Desktop users, security isn't as paramount. However, it is still important, especially if you store any sensitive information on your computer. Some people store their private financial information on their computers. This is why Windows creates problems. Other Windows security problems are just obvious: the plethora of virus', exploits, worms, etc etc etc. These are areas where Linux is better (if not misconfigured so as to be insecure). The reason for Linux and not OpenBSD is because computer's are not an end in themselves. They exist to do certain functions; many of the daily things which people want to do on their computers just aren't possible to do on OpenBSD, or are a real pain, but are possible to do in Linux.
Stating people should use Windows, MacOS, Linux, or xBSD is over-general. Do you know precisely what every users' needs/desires are? No. Then how can you possibly say what OS they should use? The answer is you can't.
Of course, I haven't really responded to your question "if security's such a BFD, why isn't BSD more popular around here?" The answer is that security isn't considered paramount, above all else. If you wanted to be completely secure with your computer, you could unplug it from the internet and never plug it back in, and lock it up in a vault-room, with finger-print protection. People here probably consider other things important as well...
Yuck, the fact that you're forced to navigate directories in Mac OS SUCKS. Fortunately, they have the Apple menu, but those retards did away with that in OSX, where the Apple Menu doesn't include a list of most programs. Navigating through menus is much quicker than navigating through a file-system.
However, it's a big win for Lindows. They get $20 million just for changing their domain name and company name. It's pretty clear that MS would have lost this case. You don't get trademarks to everything that even sounds like what you have a trademark to.
As a libertarian, I'm against trademarks, tradesecrets, patents, and copyrights to begin with. See the following articles:
Against Intellectual Property. Kinsella, Stephan.
Do patents and copyrights undermine private property?
Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs? Cole, Julio H.
Government and Microsoft: A Libertarian View on Monopolies. Rideau, François-René.
Against Intellectual Property. Martin, Brian.
The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights. Long, Roderick T.
Furthermore, the first part of the 17th article is "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others." If someone can take one of your possessions away against you will, then it is not really your property (unless it's being taken away because you committed a crime and are obligated to make restitution to the victim).
If we wanted to have a universal declaration by which to judge all societies, we could put it in one sentence:
No-one shall initiate aggression against anyone else, and the initiation of aggression shall be a crime.
Any action which involves the initiation of aggression against someone else -- whether performed by individuals acting alone, or acting in concert via the State -- is a criminal act. Simply because the UN and US agree on something doesn't mean it's not arbitrary (determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle).
The entire thing is also hopelessly vague.
Furthermore, you haven't addressed the main problem with this bullshit, which is that it demands something which is impossible except in a very highly technological society. Certainly, none of the vast array of "positive rights" that this worthless doctrine lays out can be achieved by State actions (initiating aggression against individuals); they can only be accomplished, in the future, by allowing the free market to operate without hamperence.
Simply because a bunch of crooks (and these people are all crooks, as their salary is provided for by robbery and thievery at the tax-payer's expense) get together and write down this crap doesn't make it true, morally correct, or legally correct by natural law. The Nazi's also got together and wrote a whole bunch of "laws", as well. Most of this, if we were forced to adhere to it, would necessitate initiating aggression against others, either against their person or their property. Employers would be forced to hire people they don't want to hire on terms they don't voluntarily agree to, for example. It is morally bankrupt.
Let's go over this bunk in detail...
All fine and good.
Since most the "rights and freedoms set forth" in this article are arbitrary and wrong, this is also wrong (albeit, if the rest of the declaration weren't bunk, it would be true). The problem here is with the idea that man can legislate the morality of right and wrong, and of what we should and should not be prevented from doing by force. For this robs the meaning of the word "should", as if there's anything that we think we "shouldn't" do, we can just draw up some legislating saying that we can and should be able to do it.
For the most part fine, so long as it is properly understood. My right to life means I can take measures to preserve my life and protect myself from criminals. It does not mean I can steal from anyone else or initiate aggression against an
We all know that rich people don't necessarily understand much about economics. Warren Buffet, for example, doesn't fundamentally understand what causes a business cycle. He's brilliant at finding quality companies that are under-valued, but one skill doesn't imply the other. Of course, Buffet knows the proximal causes of a crash (the mass over-valuing of business' and of various product-lines), but he doesn't know the ultimate cause (what causes those factors, which is what Austrians like Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard have explained).
Also consider John Maynard Keynes, who had an exceptional record as an investor, following Benjamin Graham's principles. Keynes was a terrible economist, and his idiotic non-sense has been responsible for much misery in the past century.
That if we ever want to come anywhere near to accomplishing all of the things that the UDHR calls for (and indeed, if society can provide for all those things on a voluntary, not coerced, basis that would be an accomplishment), then the fastest way to make such a possibility is to allow the free market to work, absent State-intervention which hampers progress and prevents prices from lowering (e.g., inflation).
These are just a bunch of arbitrary declarations. I could just as easily arbitrarily declare "everyone has the right to drive a Mercedes Benz". What hogwash.
The UDHR is nothing but an arbitrary hodge-podge of semi-libertarian beliefs (which is ok), mixed in with socialist non-sense, like the "right to a job". The worthless thing is even self-contradictory (articles 23, 24, 25, 26, and any other articles asserting positive, as opposed to negative, rights contradict article 17). I could criticize this junk in detail, but sufficed to say it is socialist crap.
It mandates violating personal and property rights, since these positive rights can only be secured by either taxing (stealing) from some people, violating individual's property rights (by forcing them to employ people on terms they would not do of their own free will), or simply enslaving doctors (since everyone has the "right" to health-care).
The worthlessness of this doctrine can be understood once you realize that the demands it makes could only possibly be achieved in a highly technological society; in other words, philosophically, it is worthless, as it cannot apply for any non-technological society.
Sorry, but that is not an argument against my position. Either you can try to make a rational argument, or not. But simply saying that all of my links are from the same website shows nothing (especially since they're from different authors). If I had linked to those articles from the author's home-pages, you would have nothing to say.
/. about "information just wants to be free", I'd think people would be happy that there's a website offering up hundreds of books (many of them 1000s of pages or more), essays, videos, and even audio-lectures all for free.
I also could have linked to many books from Amazon.com covering the same topic. It just happens to be that Mises.org provides a vast array of books and articles online for free. After all the whining on
Your understanding of monopoly is flawed. A monopoly occurs when one company is granted priviledges by the State, such that competitors cannot enter the market-place. This has been the case with various utilities companies. However, simply because one company has obtained a large market-share does not make them a monopoly, by the true definition of the word. Nor should their property rights be violated.
You also don't understand competition in the free market. It is not some violent affair, like a bully dominating smaller kids. Competitors compete with eachother to obtain the patronage of consumers. Consumers can choose which companies to patronize, of their own free will. No company has the right to make a profit. Nor, really, do consumers have the right to demand anything of producers. Nor do producers (like MS) have the right to demand anything from anyone else. Everyone has the right to either engage in a voluntary transaction or not to. All that this anti-trust crap is about is MS' competitors whining because consumers are apparently choosing MS' products over theirs.
If you don't like MS, you're welcomed not to buy their products. Competitors are welcomed to compete against them and produce better products. What you shouldn't be normatively entitled to do is to violate MS' property rights because you don't like them. Grow up.