Look, you were trying to make a point about political corruption. Then you switched to bureaucratic corruption, a completely different thing, and then you provided statistics that don't even support that point.
The "corruption" we are actually talking about (politicians giving favors to private companies) is primarily rent seeking. You can't measure that by asking people "did you pay a bribe".
Actually the countries with the best growth, wealth, education, etc are generally a mix of socialist and capitalist. The Nordic countries, Germany, the larger Commonwealth countries are all doing quite well.
As I was saying, you're seeing a cause-and-effect where there is none. And when I say "high growth rates", almost none of them are doing as well as the US (the only ones doing better than the US are tax havens and oil producers):
Other examples of pure capitalist countries being corrupt...
You're trying to reduce complex economic and political science issues to a bunch of ill-thought-out anecdotes.
I'm old fashioned and think that people and countries should live in their means and have the minimum of debt. I'm also old fashioned and think that governments should follow their Constitutions and not turn into police states and taking the best of different systems seems to work the best.
And I'm old-fashioned in that I think that you should worry about your own country and stay out of US politics.
Why in a representative democracy should the party in power be able to fix things to give them a future advantage? Just the idea of politicians having power in how the electoral process works reeks of corruption. And no, corruption does not have to involve money. And why reference Europeans? It's a big place with a lot of different cultures and political systems.
We're talking about Europe because you made comparisons with Europe and said that gerrymandering is the most brazen form of political corruption in the US. I pointed out that not only is gerrymandering common in Europe, European political parties have far more sinister ways of corrupting the political process.
The American Congress consistently has very high dissatisfaction ratings and yet keep getting re-elected.
Yes: people dislike other representatives and generally like their own. Hardly surprising because each representative acts in his own district's interest.
I'm not sure what point the rest of your paragraph is supposed to make.
It's America that pretends to be the bastion of freedom and is acting like a bully on the world stage.
We don't "pretend", we are, as far as US citizens are concerned. Like all governments, US government is an imperfect compromise, but it gives us more freedom (but also more responsibility and less safety) than most other governments. See, freedom isn't just good, it also comes at a high cost. Europeans choose less freedom and pay less of those costs.
If you're living elsewhere, it's not the job of the US government to give you what you want. If you make decisions that conflict with our interests, we will "bully" you. And that applies even to what you may consider a "democracy": if you impose trade restrictions, impede the flow of capital, or deny us access to resources or trade, the US will come down hard on you.
And let me point out that US pressure is far more benign than anything Europe has done to the rest of the world over the past few centuries.
Here I thought that it cost a fortune to run for power in the American federal government which means needing large campaign contributions with the contributors expecting favours in return. Glad to hear I'm totally wrong on that.
Yes, you are "totally wrong" on that. People do need large amounts of money, but the rest is b.s.
Free markets are great but expecting them to stay free, especially as they grow is as stupid as expecting to have a communist state without some arsehole dictator seizing power.
The threat to free markets is people like you, namely people who advocate making them unfree by law and making politics ever more corrupt. As long as people like you don't win, markets remain free and society benefits.
It was presented as if the death panels were an argument against gov't health care, while that argument would then equally (or, arguably, more, as private health care has a direct profit motive and government health care can at least pretend to not) apply to "we should scrap the current system."
The argument doesn't apply to private health care. While individual providers may make bad choices, once their policies become known, you can move to a different provider (at least you could, if we actually had a choice in health care).
What Obamacare gives insurance providers and hospitals is a central point to impose profit-maximizing healthcare requirements on every "competitor" in the market. That means that painful, costly and profitable end of life care will expand and you will be forced to pay for it because it will become part of the "basic standard of care" required by Obamacare. We have already seen that happen. Whether that care actually meaningfully expands your lifespan or wellbeing is simply not a concern, and even if you figure out that it doesn't, you will have to pay for it, and you may even be forced to undergo that treatment.
You're operating under the mistaken assumption that health outcomes improve with money spent. That's not true even if the money were spent rationally, and it is certainly not true once you combine a profit-maximizing hospital with a highly regulate market and lobbyists.
So a bank that hands somebody a few hundred thousand dollars without due diligence is not at fault?
At fault for what? They wasted their own money and the money of their investors, nothing more. Their kind of greed and stupidity punishes itself in a free market.
The injury from the mortgage "crisis" arises from the fact that the government forced people who spent their money prudently to bail out the banks and borrowers who had made stupid and greedy decisions.
We can look at the corruption perception index, where the top countries traditionally generally have democratic socialism and the bottom countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist.
If you look at the methodology, that's kind of like asking the editors of Pravda whether the USSR is corrupt. (The other statistic is just as bad.)
The reality seems to be that a mix of capitalism and socialism seems to have the best outcome for the large majority of nations.
Based on what criteria? Growth, wealth, education, etc. are certainly not consequences of such a mix.
Furthermore, you got cause and effect backwards. Most of those countries where it seems to be working OK adopted socialist-inspired policies after they became wealthy; they are spending down their wealth.
Thing is that it seems inevitable that under capitalism democratic government will be for sale to the higher bidder.
Buying Congressional seats or the presidency has frequently been unsuccessful, and very rich and powerful people regularly get tough sentences from judges. Therefore, obviously, your hypothesis is false: democratic government under capitalism does not go to the highest bidder.
What bothers you is rent seeking (lobbying, etc.), the same thing that bothers me and many other people. But rent seeking exists under all forms of government. Furthermore, the more economic activity takes place in a free market, the less rent seeking is possible.
It seems to always come down to the no true Scotsman argument, and fails whether talking about Capitalism, Communism or other isms and reality is what we have.
No, it simply comes down to people like you pulling made-up facts out of your ass.
Gerrymandering is a process by which political parties in power user their power to give them a slight advantage in future elections. It involves no "corruption" (i.e., exchange of money for political favors), and pretty limited in scope. It is also widespread in Europe, except Europeans don't know and don't care.
But European parties in power have many more mechanisms to hurt their opponents and help themselves, and they use those mechanisms frequently. Again, Europeans don't know and don't care.
other ways the American democratic process has been corrupted, witness the re-election statistics
In what way is it "corruption" when American voters choose to send the same representative to Congress year after year?
In what way do you think is Europe better? The UK has lifetime peerage. Germany has a large part of its parliament appointed by party committees who keep unelectable politicians in parliament.
Can you even find reelection statistics for, say, Germany?
Here whole political parties have been wiped out due to perceived corruption.
And in the US, political parties have changed radically in their composition and political programs over the past two centuries; only the labels have remained the same. Furthermore, representatives within those parties are far more independent than representatives in European political parties. Voting against your party, common in the US, will get you in serious trouble in many places in Europe.
Yup, they "assert" this, but "asserting" something doesn't make it true. Socialists like to use the term to blame capitalism for what is actually a failure of government. "Crony capitalism" is "capitalism" in the same way that the "German Democratic Republic" was "democratic".
People with functioning brain stems!
Unfortunately, not much above their brain stems is functioning.
Belesconi went down for stuff far *less* brazen than what some congress too.
Are you kidding? Berlusconi was charged with massive bribery, corruption, sex with underage girls, wiretapping, money laundering, using his media empire for defamation, and many other charges.
In the US, politicians wouldn't generally survive any one of these affairs. And in the US, these decisions are up to voters, as they should be, not judges or parliamentary majorities.
I don't understand why Congress doesn't run afoul of the conflict of interest laws
Conflict of interest laws apply to judges and civil servants because they are not elected.
For elected officials, we have a much simpler and more direct way of getting rid of them: we vote for someone else.
You want to get rid of some other district's elected representative because you don't like what they are saying or doing? Tough sh*t, democracy doesn't work like that.
Please. Don't be dense. The manufacture of munitions(unlike guns, which at their simplest are literally just metal tubes) isn't something that can be done at home by 3d printing. Modern chemical charges can't be made through home processes,
The guns and gunpowder people made in the 18th and 19th century still work today. All you need to make them is some basic metal working tools (for the gun and cartridge), and urine, wood, and sulfur (for the gunpowder). They aren't going to be quite as powerful as modern guns, but that hardly matters. Trying to control access to guns through controlling the tools to create them is futile.
It might not work for poor teens, but for criminals with a working "business model" and funds, it's a piece of cake.
Making guns from scratch isn't hard. Criminals with a business model only need a drill, some tools, and some steel, and they get better guns for less money than anything 3D printed.
The war on guns is going just like the war on drugs: after dire warnings about threats to the suburban middle class ("reefer madness"), we have now reached the "this is your brain on drugs" stage. I expect for the further stages of the "war on..." to follow as usual.
I don't see how this would come through the Bundestag, the German parliament, without being at least watered down, viz. being quietly forced into starvation as soon as a left-leaning government comes into power.
The same way that the government of Brandt that gave the NSA a carte blanche to spy in Germany.
...is that Germany is much closer to being a true and functioning democracy
If by "true and functioning democracy", you mean a mix of right wing populism, left wing demagoguery, technocracy, and corporate cronyism, then Germany is indeed closer to it; but fear not, the US is rapidly heading down that way too, led by such luminaries as Bush and Obama.
I really don't know what you mean by "free market" at this point. How much government regulation do you allow?
A free market is a market in which business between private parties is transacted voluntarily and according to mutually agreed terms.
If not much, then free markets will develop monopolies and cartels.
That's Marxist economic theory and is false in general. There are a few natural monopolies that develop by themselves in free markets. Most of those monopolies are harmless and require no government intervention at all.
Most monopolies are created through government action (barriers to entry, patents, copyrights, special rights, etc.).
I know what ruthlessly efficient means.
Evidently you don't know what "ruthlessly efficient" means. It means that when companies see an opportunity to be efficient, they are "ruthless" about it, not that they are good at spotting every opportunity or achieving efficiency. That is, given the same opportunity for improving efficiency, the only consideration for a corporation is competitiveness, while public institutions are concerned about making politicians, unions, and voters happy.
If companies were, they would sweep out the dead wood and re form inefficient departments.
Companies don't do that because there are high costs associated with hiring and firing people, most of which are a consequence of deliberate government regulations in a (misguided) attempt to keep unemployment low.
Agriculture is a silly one to complain about and is a prime example of why the market cannot be trusted. It is of such immense strategic importance that it's necessary to hedge against disaster by propping it up even if the reasons for the propping up (one can only hope) never come to pass.
Oh, boy, you really buy that b.s.? You really think that creating vast storehouses of food and then destroying them, while keeping prices high, has any purpose other than transferring money from the public to a large and politically powerful special interest group, namely farmers?
You could also point to telecoms. Th UK and EU in general has a very heavily regulated mobile telecoms market. As a result we have the most fantastic range of different operators, prices options etc.
The UK and EU has decent telecoms competition now because they have partially deregulated their industries, like the US.
Germany has a medical insurance based market, also very very heavily regulated and it gives them one of the better systems for national healthcare in the world.
Odd you would list Germany; why not talk about the UK system if you want to extol the virtues of regulation? Anyway, though lower than the US, Germany has one of the highest per-capita health care expenditures in the world, but their system is also more free market oriented than the US system, so that doesn't support the point you're trying to make. And Germany's system is worse than the US in terms of delivering health care.
It's the same with the military. The free market won't support the military because it doesn't need it now. This is why you have governments.
The military is not part of the market because it is not about voluntary transactions between private parties but about involuntary international relations and the use of force.
So, it appears you are not complaining about regulation so much as the specific regulations in the US. That's a very different point.
I'm not "complaining", I am pointing out common economic mistakes in what you write.
The NSA couldn't spy and monitor in Germany without the close and widespread collaboration of the German government and German corporations.
What they are really saying is that they couldn't find someone to shift the blame to outside the government or the corporations close to the government.
I don't know what you think I think regulations do, but you have basically conceded that the free market can't solve things alone.
There's nothing to "concede". I never argued for an anarchy (absence of regulations or government), I argued for free markets (the ability to make private contracts freely).
Regulations aren't prefect and rely on imprefect regulators and enforcers. But then neither is the free market which relies on the action of imprefect humans.
That's a false equivalence. Free markets are self-regulating, that is they punish bad market-related behavior automatically without the intervention of regulators; if you are corrupt or stupid in a free market, you hurt yourself. Regulators and enforcers, however, respond to rent seeking, lobbying, and corruption; when they are corrupt and stupid, they get rewarded and society suffers.
Ah subtly moving the goalposts there. More efficient than the others, but not efficient.
The phrase I used was "ruthlessly efficient". That doesn't mean "maximally efficient" in any sense, it means that when a company sees an opportunity to improve efficiency, it will do so without considering political, social, or personal factors. That is what our education system is lacking; it is burdened with many other considerations that have nothing to do with successfully delivering education.
They have enough proprietary knowledge that even with a huge, bloated, inefficient coprorate buearocracy, they can still produce products that other people want.
Yes, but soon other companies figure out how to produce the same products better and cheaper and such companies go away. For big corporations, it usually takes a decade or two, but it does happen. Look at VCRs and PCs, for example. It takes longer when government regulations try to prop up bad companies; agriculture, cars, oil, banks, medical insurance, and steel are all examples of highly inefficient industries that are inefficient because they are regulated.
Many big companies in the US today have a significant degree of inefficiency due to regulations and rent seeking: they can afford to be wasteful because government protects them from competition and hands them vast amounts of money (stimulus, bailouts, contracts). Most of the problems progressives and advocates of regulated markets blame free markets for are, in fact, problems actually created by regulations and government intervention in the market.
Piketty's book has never been about facts or data; it was clear from day one that it was wrong throughout because not even his assumptions make much sense.
Piketty is to economics what Michael Behe is to biology ("irreducible complexity"). In the end, people on the left foolishly deny Adam Smith just like people on the right foolishly deny Darwin. A pox on both your houses.
Governments, and other decision-making entities, are rarely acting on certainty.
I'm sorry you have trouble understanding basic English. Nowhere did I claim that governments "acted on certainty". And since you seem easily confused, nowhere did I claim that decisions required certainty either.
What I said was that acting on a "best guess at the time" is "insufficient". By that I mean that making decisions based on your "best guess at the time" is an irrational and potentially harmful decision rule in general; that's just a mathematical fact. Since I prefer government not to act irrationally or cause harm, government ought not to act in that way.
Can you explain why you want government to behave irrationally or cause harm?
Publishers are evil and powerful. They lobby, they manipulate public opinion, they get lousy IP legislation passed, and they rob authors and customers alike. Politicians are scared of publishers because they have so much power. If Amazon manages to destroy publishers and the current business model of publishers, we all win.
Let Amazon work at destroying publishers a little longer. We can still figure out what to do with Amazon after the publishers are gone.
Scientific consensus is NOT the "merely mobbing using peer reviews and grant committees."
Please quote accurately. I didn't say it was "merely" that, or even that it was that. I said that erroneous scientific consensus was hard to overturn because scientists, like any other group of people, are engaging in a form of mobbing. You have to be extremely naive to believe that scientists, uniquely among all human professions and groups, would be immune to this.
Peer reviewers do not get to kill papers because they don't like them, in fact they DO NOT GET TO KILL PAPERS.
Indeed; the decision to reject lies with the editor. An editor will generally reject a paper (1) if he doesn't like it or doesn't like the conclusions (commonly because it contradicts his own beliefs), or (2) because the peer reviews are bad. Editors almost never accept papers that have gotten bad peer reviews.
Scientific consensus is just that, you look at what researchers are concluding in their studies and you see if there is a mountain of evidence pointing to a similar conclusion: e.g. virtually everyone who throws up something sees it fall back down points to gravity.
That's what scientific consensus should be based on, namely experimental results that can be repeated many times independently, over a long time, by many researchers.
That is not how people use the term today. For example, in climate science, "scientific consensus" merely means "everybody who actually publishes doesn't explicitly disagree with this theory".
Slashdot Mirror
Look, you were trying to make a point about political corruption. Then you switched to bureaucratic corruption, a completely different thing, and then you provided statistics that don't even support that point.
The "corruption" we are actually talking about (politicians giving favors to private companies) is primarily rent seeking. You can't measure that by asking people "did you pay a bribe".
As I was saying, you're seeing a cause-and-effect where there is none. And when I say "high growth rates", almost none of them are doing as well as the US (the only ones doing better than the US are tax havens and oil producers):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Northern Europeans aren't that wealthy to begin with, relative to the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
You're trying to reduce complex economic and political science issues to a bunch of ill-thought-out anecdotes.
And I'm old-fashioned in that I think that you should worry about your own country and stay out of US politics.
We're talking about Europe because you made comparisons with Europe and said that gerrymandering is the most brazen form of political corruption in the US. I pointed out that not only is gerrymandering common in Europe, European political parties have far more sinister ways of corrupting the political process.
Yes: people dislike other representatives and generally like their own. Hardly surprising because each representative acts in his own district's interest.
I'm not sure what point the rest of your paragraph is supposed to make.
We don't "pretend", we are, as far as US citizens are concerned. Like all governments, US government is an imperfect compromise, but it gives us more freedom (but also more responsibility and less safety) than most other governments. See, freedom isn't just good, it also comes at a high cost. Europeans choose less freedom and pay less of those costs.
If you're living elsewhere, it's not the job of the US government to give you what you want. If you make decisions that conflict with our interests, we will "bully" you. And that applies even to what you may consider a "democracy": if you impose trade restrictions, impede the flow of capital, or deny us access to resources or trade, the US will come down hard on you.
And let me point out that US pressure is far more benign than anything Europe has done to the rest of the world over the past few centuries.
Yes, you are "totally wrong" on that. People do need large amounts of money, but the rest is b.s.
The threat to free markets is people like you, namely people who advocate making them unfree by law and making politics ever more corrupt. As long as people like you don't win, markets remain free and society benefits.
The argument doesn't apply to private health care. While individual providers may make bad choices, once their policies become known, you can move to a different provider (at least you could, if we actually had a choice in health care).
What Obamacare gives insurance providers and hospitals is a central point to impose profit-maximizing healthcare requirements on every "competitor" in the market. That means that painful, costly and profitable end of life care will expand and you will be forced to pay for it because it will become part of the "basic standard of care" required by Obamacare. We have already seen that happen. Whether that care actually meaningfully expands your lifespan or wellbeing is simply not a concern, and even if you figure out that it doesn't, you will have to pay for it, and you may even be forced to undergo that treatment.
You're operating under the mistaken assumption that health outcomes improve with money spent. That's not true even if the money were spent rationally, and it is certainly not true once you combine a profit-maximizing hospital with a highly regulate market and lobbyists.
At fault for what? They wasted their own money and the money of their investors, nothing more. Their kind of greed and stupidity punishes itself in a free market.
The injury from the mortgage "crisis" arises from the fact that the government forced people who spent their money prudently to bail out the banks and borrowers who had made stupid and greedy decisions.
If you look at the methodology, that's kind of like asking the editors of Pravda whether the USSR is corrupt. (The other statistic is just as bad.)
Based on what criteria? Growth, wealth, education, etc. are certainly not consequences of such a mix.
Furthermore, you got cause and effect backwards. Most of those countries where it seems to be working OK adopted socialist-inspired policies after they became wealthy; they are spending down their wealth.
Buying Congressional seats or the presidency has frequently been unsuccessful, and very rich and powerful people regularly get tough sentences from judges. Therefore, obviously, your hypothesis is false: democratic government under capitalism does not go to the highest bidder.
What bothers you is rent seeking (lobbying, etc.), the same thing that bothers me and many other people. But rent seeking exists under all forms of government. Furthermore, the more economic activity takes place in a free market, the less rent seeking is possible.
No, it simply comes down to people like you pulling made-up facts out of your ass.
Gerrymandering is a process by which political parties in power user their power to give them a slight advantage in future elections. It involves no "corruption" (i.e., exchange of money for political favors), and pretty limited in scope. It is also widespread in Europe, except Europeans don't know and don't care.
But European parties in power have many more mechanisms to hurt their opponents and help themselves, and they use those mechanisms frequently. Again, Europeans don't know and don't care.
In what way is it "corruption" when American voters choose to send the same representative to Congress year after year?
In what way do you think is Europe better? The UK has lifetime peerage. Germany has a large part of its parliament appointed by party committees who keep unelectable politicians in parliament.
Can you even find reelection statistics for, say, Germany?
And in the US, political parties have changed radically in their composition and political programs over the past two centuries; only the labels have remained the same. Furthermore, representatives within those parties are far more independent than representatives in European political parties. Voting against your party, common in the US, will get you in serious trouble in many places in Europe.
Wow, you really are totally ignorant, aren't you?
Yup, they "assert" this, but "asserting" something doesn't make it true. Socialists like to use the term to blame capitalism for what is actually a failure of government. "Crony capitalism" is "capitalism" in the same way that the "German Democratic Republic" was "democratic".
Unfortunately, not much above their brain stems is functioning.
Are you kidding? Berlusconi was charged with massive bribery, corruption, sex with underage girls, wiretapping, money laundering, using his media empire for defamation, and many other charges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
In the US, politicians wouldn't generally survive any one of these affairs. And in the US, these decisions are up to voters, as they should be, not judges or parliamentary majorities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Conflict of interest laws apply to judges and civil servants because they are not elected.
For elected officials, we have a much simpler and more direct way of getting rid of them: we vote for someone else.
You want to get rid of some other district's elected representative because you don't like what they are saying or doing? Tough sh*t, democracy doesn't work like that.
The guns and gunpowder people made in the 18th and 19th century still work today. All you need to make them is some basic metal working tools (for the gun and cartridge), and urine, wood, and sulfur (for the gunpowder). They aren't going to be quite as powerful as modern guns, but that hardly matters. Trying to control access to guns through controlling the tools to create them is futile.
Making guns from scratch isn't hard. Criminals with a business model only need a drill, some tools, and some steel, and they get better guns for less money than anything 3D printed.
The war on guns is going just like the war on drugs: after dire warnings about threats to the suburban middle class ("reefer madness"), we have now reached the "this is your brain on drugs" stage. I expect for the further stages of the "war on..." to follow as usual.
The same way that the government of Brandt that gave the NSA a carte blanche to spy in Germany.
If by "true and functioning democracy", you mean a mix of right wing populism, left wing demagoguery, technocracy, and corporate cronyism, then Germany is indeed closer to it; but fear not, the US is rapidly heading down that way too, led by such luminaries as Bush and Obama.
Germany has been hostile to capitalism for as long as capitalism has existed. Since Germany never had capitalism, it can't actually end there.
Widespread, heavy government control of citizens has been part of German culture for centuries. For Germany, this is nothing new.
A free market is a market in which business between private parties is transacted voluntarily and according to mutually agreed terms.
That's Marxist economic theory and is false in general. There are a few natural monopolies that develop by themselves in free markets. Most of those monopolies are harmless and require no government intervention at all.
Most monopolies are created through government action (barriers to entry, patents, copyrights, special rights, etc.).
Evidently you don't know what "ruthlessly efficient" means. It means that when companies see an opportunity to be efficient, they are "ruthless" about it, not that they are good at spotting every opportunity or achieving efficiency. That is, given the same opportunity for improving efficiency, the only consideration for a corporation is competitiveness, while public institutions are concerned about making politicians, unions, and voters happy.
Companies don't do that because there are high costs associated with hiring and firing people, most of which are a consequence of deliberate government regulations in a (misguided) attempt to keep unemployment low.
Oh, boy, you really buy that b.s.? You really think that creating vast storehouses of food and then destroying them, while keeping prices high, has any purpose other than transferring money from the public to a large and politically powerful special interest group, namely farmers?
The UK and EU has decent telecoms competition now because they have partially deregulated their industries, like the US.
Odd you would list Germany; why not talk about the UK system if you want to extol the virtues of regulation? Anyway, though lower than the US, Germany has one of the highest per-capita health care expenditures in the world, but their system is also more free market oriented than the US system, so that doesn't support the point you're trying to make. And Germany's system is worse than the US in terms of delivering health care.
The military is not part of the market because it is not about voluntary transactions between private parties but about involuntary international relations and the use of force.
I'm not "complaining", I am pointing out common economic mistakes in what you write.
The NSA couldn't spy and monitor in Germany without the close and widespread collaboration of the German government and German corporations.
What they are really saying is that they couldn't find someone to shift the blame to outside the government or the corporations close to the government.
There's nothing to "concede". I never argued for an anarchy (absence of regulations or government), I argued for free markets (the ability to make private contracts freely).
That's a false equivalence. Free markets are self-regulating, that is they punish bad market-related behavior automatically without the intervention of regulators; if you are corrupt or stupid in a free market, you hurt yourself. Regulators and enforcers, however, respond to rent seeking, lobbying, and corruption; when they are corrupt and stupid, they get rewarded and society suffers.
The phrase I used was "ruthlessly efficient". That doesn't mean "maximally efficient" in any sense, it means that when a company sees an opportunity to improve efficiency, it will do so without considering political, social, or personal factors. That is what our education system is lacking; it is burdened with many other considerations that have nothing to do with successfully delivering education.
Yes, but soon other companies figure out how to produce the same products better and cheaper and such companies go away. For big corporations, it usually takes a decade or two, but it does happen. Look at VCRs and PCs, for example. It takes longer when government regulations try to prop up bad companies; agriculture, cars, oil, banks, medical insurance, and steel are all examples of highly inefficient industries that are inefficient because they are regulated.
Many big companies in the US today have a significant degree of inefficiency due to regulations and rent seeking: they can afford to be wasteful because government protects them from competition and hands them vast amounts of money (stimulus, bailouts, contracts). Most of the problems progressives and advocates of regulated markets blame free markets for are, in fact, problems actually created by regulations and government intervention in the market.
Piketty's book has never been about facts or data; it was clear from day one that it was wrong throughout because not even his assumptions make much sense.
Piketty is to economics what Michael Behe is to biology ("irreducible complexity"). In the end, people on the left foolishly deny Adam Smith just like people on the right foolishly deny Darwin. A pox on both your houses.
I'm sorry you have trouble understanding basic English. Nowhere did I claim that governments "acted on certainty". And since you seem easily confused, nowhere did I claim that decisions required certainty either.
What I said was that acting on a "best guess at the time" is "insufficient". By that I mean that making decisions based on your "best guess at the time" is an irrational and potentially harmful decision rule in general; that's just a mathematical fact. Since I prefer government not to act irrationally or cause harm, government ought not to act in that way.
Can you explain why you want government to behave irrationally or cause harm?
Publishers are evil and powerful. They lobby, they manipulate public opinion, they get lousy IP legislation passed, and they rob authors and customers alike. Politicians are scared of publishers because they have so much power. If Amazon manages to destroy publishers and the current business model of publishers, we all win.
Let Amazon work at destroying publishers a little longer. We can still figure out what to do with Amazon after the publishers are gone.
Please quote accurately. I didn't say it was "merely" that, or even that it was that. I said that erroneous scientific consensus was hard to overturn because scientists, like any other group of people, are engaging in a form of mobbing. You have to be extremely naive to believe that scientists, uniquely among all human professions and groups, would be immune to this.
Indeed; the decision to reject lies with the editor. An editor will generally reject a paper (1) if he doesn't like it or doesn't like the conclusions (commonly because it contradicts his own beliefs), or (2) because the peer reviews are bad. Editors almost never accept papers that have gotten bad peer reviews.
That's what scientific consensus should be based on, namely experimental results that can be repeated many times independently, over a long time, by many researchers.
That is not how people use the term today. For example, in climate science, "scientific consensus" merely means "everybody who actually publishes doesn't explicitly disagree with this theory".