"This is exactly what the BBC is all about - bringing the industry together on an unprecedented scale and making a difference to millions,"
Really? It's the job of a public broadcasting organization financed largely by mandatory TV and Internet license fees to give away a million embedded systems, most of which will simply gather dust or blink a few times, on the theory that programming will continue to be a lucrative profession 20 years down the road?
Does a high per-capita GDP contradict any of what I said originally? No.
Do you understand that someone in San Francisco, CA, or New York City, NY, is likely economically worse off as someone in Danville, IL, doing the same job? That per capita state GDP has no direct bearing on whether people want to move into or out of a state?
But, ah, don't let facts get in the way of your political biases. I mean, why should you care how well people are doing, as long as politicians make money slosh around through the economy and get the GDP numbers up.
I'm sorry, but a debt of 130 billion on a Gross State Product of 2 trillion hardly counts as 'deeply in debt'.
California's debt at the state level is many times larger. Even Gov. Brown estimated it at $354b last year, and that's likely far too low. You have to add to that even larger local debts.
Debt is irrelevant. What is relevant is being able to service that debt; California has had its troubles in that area, but mostly because idiots like you managed to shackle the government's tax-raising powers.
What "shackles the [state's] tax-raising powers" is that people and companies leave the state when taxes get too high. There are plenty of nice places to live that have much lower or no income tax, and better infrastructure and better schools to boot. And who, pray tell, "shackles" California's tax raising powers anyway? The state is entirely in the hands of Democrats.
Every gas station is owned by on of those 6 oil companies here so when they can as a unit raise prices, it increases profits.
That is highly unlikely. Oil companies own only a few percent of all retail gas stations. You're confusing branding with ownership. A "Chevron" gas station is usually not owned by Chevron, for example.
Free markets need multiple players playing on a level playground
You mean like six oil companies and a few tens of thousands of independent retailers?
There's your explanation. They're trying to run out the riff-raff.
There is a good deal of truth to that: the wealthy elderly in California are both politically powerful, and they don't give a f*ck about the future of the state.
If you look at the state, it's deeply in debt and politically utterly dysfunctional. Educational performance has fallen to nearly the bottom of the nation. The infrastructure is falling apart. Taxes are sky-high. The prisons are overcrowded and an embarrassment to the nation. Everything is regulated, from putting a shed in your backyard to how the hens are kept that produce your eggs. People and businesses are moving out of the state if they can.
California weather and scenery will mean that it will always remain a playground for retirees and the wealthy. And its widespread crony capitalism will keep some corporations around. But anybody with half a brain, and anybody who actually wants to innovate and accomplish something will move elsewhere.
So? You gave gas as an example of free market failure and accused gas stations of profiteering. Your claims are bullshit, both because gasoline is a highly regulated market, and because gas station profit margins are razor thin. In different words, all you have shown is that your dislike of free markets is based on ignorance.
If all you care about is trade, yeah, they're super awesome. If you care about anything else, they're still medieval loonies.
Sure, but you can't blame "American and British corporate interventionism" for that. That is entirely due to their oh-so-high-and-mighty culture. And it's true for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
Israel is not a "secular liberal democracy": it accords special status to one particular religion, and in real life, there is massive discrimination against non-Jews that is tolerated by the government. You're right that Israel is a lot better than the nations around it, but so what? And claiming that "the Arab world has significantly regressed since the 1960's, and largely due to American and British corporate interventionism" is ludicrous: in fact, the Arab world has improved greatly economically since the 1960's, and liberalization of trade and influx of Western investment is responsible for that.
But the real question is: why should America even care about any of this b.s.? There is almost nothing of interest to the US in the Middle East. We get our oil from elsewhere, those countries aren't economically significant, they don't matter strategically anymore, and we owe nothing to either Israel or the Arab nations. All we are doing with our continued meddling in the Middle East is waste a lot of money and paint a big red target on our own backs.
The problem is in the details. They do believe in small government and "free" market capitalism.
Conservatives? No, they don't. Sorry. No more than liberals are anti-big business or pro consumer. Both conservatives and liberals are in the pockets of big industry lobbies, just different ones.
I'd expect the competition to drive down prices to the point where there is enough profit to keep operating and no more.
And it does: gas stations are pretty much the least profitable of all retail businesses. That's why they are so quick to adjust all their prices in lockstep.
This works in things like grocery stores where there is a competitive market but when all the gas stations are priced 2 cents a litre lower then the next town over and the next town over has 15 cents a litre more taxes (transit) to deal with the implication is that they are making an extra 13 cents a litre profit (actually more as the cost of rent here is less and they're closer to the source) then the next town (actually quite a few towns and cities) over.
You have no idea what their cost structure is, so you are simply fabricating these numbers out of thin air.
Yes, that is what our government claims to be about, less government (oversight) and more free market capitalism, they're the Conservatives.
As you may notice, politicians who claim to support free market capitalism and small government usually don't. Welcome to the real world.
As for collusion, I'm sure it is just coincidence that every gas station raises and lowers their prices in lockstep and within minutes of each other
It's not a coincidence at all, it's competition in a free market the way it should be: they look at each other's prices and maintain consistent price differentials based on location and other features. I mean, how would it work otherwise in a free market?
Every time the price of the raw product goes up, it goes up at the pump with the oil companies claiming that the price is dependent on the price of the raw product.
It is dependent on the price of the raw product, but over time. Producers take into account reserves, current, and future availability and prices.
The suggestion that gas prices are the result of collusion and oligopolies has been disproven time and again. E.g., http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Here in Canada its the government that is highly controlled by the oil companies, at least with the current government.
The government is "controlled" by every special interest with deep pockets and a big lobby. The solution to that is more free market capitalism and less government power.
Geez, do you really need the context spelled out even more clearly? The distinction I was drawing was between economically more rational and morally more enlightened. That is, many societies and producers abandoned forced labor for economic reasons, not for moral or political reasons. Conversely, slavery is a results of political oppression, not of free markets.
Adam Smith wrote that a man had a right to sell his labor. What protected that right during the slavery period, in the US? Capitalism needs something outside of it,
Actually, Adam Smith also argued that slavery wasn't just a moral evil, but that it was also economically irrational. And history has proven him right: in most places in the world, forced labor ended not because societies became more enlightened, but because it simply wasn't economically rational.
because capitalism alone has no morality and perversely incentivizes lying and other sociopathic behavior
Quite the opposite: Smith's main point is that free markets punish lying and sociopathic behavior, because people don't voluntarily choose to do transactions with people who engage in such behavior.
Basically, yes: China stagnated because it didn't take advantage of its knowledge and skills. And it didn't take advantage of it because there was little incentive to doing so for individuals: mandarins aren't rewarded for risk taking and innovation, they are rewarded for obedience.
I paid an extra $15 to fill my gas tank yesterday compared to last week, every gas station had raised its price by exactly the same amount while the price of the raw product dropped slightly.
I'm not sure I get your point. Why would the price of the raw product directly relate to the price at the pump?
A second problem with that reasoning is that the market in oil and gas simply isn't a free market, it is highly controlled by governments from beginning to end.
Seems the oil companies want to continue earning record profits
Oil companies have nice profit margins (around 16% industry average), but they also face high risks. That's similar to dentists, physicians, and tax preparers. It's far below Apple. And if you want your share in that profit margin, just invest in them; they are mostly publicly traded.
If you read Adam Smith, you might find that Capitalism means the Government regulating business to ensure a level playing field, which causes Capital to rule because all a person needs to start a business and compete is the capital.
That is utter nonsense. Adam Smith goes out of his way to describe how government regulations are abused again and again for what we now call rent seeking. While Adam Smith wasn't categorically opposed to all government functions (he favored publicly financed defense and justice systems), he certainly did not hold the beliefs you attribute to him.
If a Chinese business person goes to a village, buys all the bananas and creates an artificial shortage, and then raises the price 300%, that is punishable by death. Why? Because he's creating an illegal monopoly, and using it to ruin the market.
This kind of ludicrous horror story gets invented time and again by opponents of free markets and rent seekers and they make no sense. How is the would-be profiteer actually going to make a business out of that and earn a profit?
Capitalism has nothing to do with Democracy.
Captialism is necessary, though not sufficient, for a free society.
For example, in "The Wages of Humanity," visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth's wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization.... We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in
We have plenty of writers, including scifi writers, that think that way too. Fortunately, it doesn't dominate our culture like it has dominated Chinese culture; misguided views like these are responsible for the long periods of stagnation and weakness that China has experienced.
There is no reason to teach BASIC anymore, in particular the obsolete forms implemented by DiscoRunner.
There are numerous programming languages you can teach kids. Python is probably a reasonable choice, but there are even simpler ones out there if you like.
That's utterly irrelevant to the point at hand, namely that roaming costs within the same provider disappeared within the US on their own, without regulation.
Why not? Cell phone prices doesn't have much to do with taxes. It's not because of subsidies that you can have a cell phone plan for 2 euros/month in France and not in the US or Canada.
First of all, Canada isn't the US, so I don't see why you keep talking about the US.
Second, I think we pretty conclusively determined how free.fr can offer those cheap plans: the French government subsidizes them by forcing roaming arrangements on the former state monopoly, Orange, and by having subsidized Orange itself even after it became a private company. That is, free.fr wasn't created by regulation, it was created by a combination of deregulation (good) and crony capitalism (bad).
Third, that has a lot to do with slow economic growth and high taxes, because the kind of economic dirigisme that lets the French government do popular things like create cheap cell phone plans out of nothing also leads to high taxes and slow growth.
I have a separate home phone and work phone.
OK, so you are a privileged upper middle class guy with tons of communications options. And you are whining because government doesn't give you cheaper cell phone service. Do you want a free pony too?
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Really? It's the job of a public broadcasting organization financed largely by mandatory TV and Internet license fees to give away a million embedded systems, most of which will simply gather dust or blink a few times, on the theory that programming will continue to be a lucrative profession 20 years down the road?
Does a high per-capita GDP contradict any of what I said originally? No.
Do you understand that someone in San Francisco, CA, or New York City, NY, is likely economically worse off as someone in Danville, IL, doing the same job? That per capita state GDP has no direct bearing on whether people want to move into or out of a state?
But, ah, don't let facts get in the way of your political biases. I mean, why should you care how well people are doing, as long as politicians make money slosh around through the economy and get the GDP numbers up.
Not just the wealthy elderly. Just the wealthiest few percent.
The wealthiest few percent are predominantly the elderly.
California's debt at the state level is many times larger. Even Gov. Brown estimated it at $354b last year, and that's likely far too low. You have to add to that even larger local debts.
What "shackles the [state's] tax-raising powers" is that people and companies leave the state when taxes get too high. There are plenty of nice places to live that have much lower or no income tax, and better infrastructure and better schools to boot. And who, pray tell, "shackles" California's tax raising powers anyway? The state is entirely in the hands of Democrats.
Look who's talking.
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/...
California ranks #4 in terms of overall tax burden, just behind NY, NJ, and CT.
California also has the top marginal income tax rate in the country; even worse if you life in SF.
Facts, you should try getting them sometimes.
Oh, and if you make less than $150k/year, you are barely middle class in the Bay Area.
But you're right: economically, Alabama is pretty lousy too. The fact that California sucks doesn't mean that some other states suck as well.
That is highly unlikely. Oil companies own only a few percent of all retail gas stations. You're confusing branding with ownership. A "Chevron" gas station is usually not owned by Chevron, for example.
You mean like six oil companies and a few tens of thousands of independent retailers?
There is a good deal of truth to that: the wealthy elderly in California are both politically powerful, and they don't give a f*ck about the future of the state.
If you look at the state, it's deeply in debt and politically utterly dysfunctional. Educational performance has fallen to nearly the bottom of the nation. The infrastructure is falling apart. Taxes are sky-high. The prisons are overcrowded and an embarrassment to the nation. Everything is regulated, from putting a shed in your backyard to how the hens are kept that produce your eggs. People and businesses are moving out of the state if they can.
California weather and scenery will mean that it will always remain a playground for retirees and the wealthy. And its widespread crony capitalism will keep some corporations around. But anybody with half a brain, and anybody who actually wants to innovate and accomplish something will move elsewhere.
So? You gave gas as an example of free market failure and accused gas stations of profiteering. Your claims are bullshit, both because gasoline is a highly regulated market, and because gas station profit margins are razor thin. In different words, all you have shown is that your dislike of free markets is based on ignorance.
Sure, but you can't blame "American and British corporate interventionism" for that. That is entirely due to their oh-so-high-and-mighty culture. And it's true for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
Israel is not a "secular liberal democracy": it accords special status to one particular religion, and in real life, there is massive discrimination against non-Jews that is tolerated by the government. You're right that Israel is a lot better than the nations around it, but so what? And claiming that "the Arab world has significantly regressed since the 1960's, and largely due to American and British corporate interventionism" is ludicrous: in fact, the Arab world has improved greatly economically since the 1960's, and liberalization of trade and influx of Western investment is responsible for that.
But the real question is: why should America even care about any of this b.s.? There is almost nothing of interest to the US in the Middle East. We get our oil from elsewhere, those countries aren't economically significant, they don't matter strategically anymore, and we owe nothing to either Israel or the Arab nations. All we are doing with our continued meddling in the Middle East is waste a lot of money and paint a big red target on our own backs.
Conservatives? No, they don't. Sorry. No more than liberals are anti-big business or pro consumer. Both conservatives and liberals are in the pockets of big industry lobbies, just different ones.
And it does: gas stations are pretty much the least profitable of all retail businesses. That's why they are so quick to adjust all their prices in lockstep.
You have no idea what their cost structure is, so you are simply fabricating these numbers out of thin air.
As you may notice, politicians who claim to support free market capitalism and small government usually don't. Welcome to the real world.
It's not a coincidence at all, it's competition in a free market the way it should be: they look at each other's prices and maintain consistent price differentials based on location and other features. I mean, how would it work otherwise in a free market?
It is dependent on the price of the raw product, but over time. Producers take into account reserves, current, and future availability and prices.
The suggestion that gas prices are the result of collusion and oligopolies has been disproven time and again. E.g., http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The government is "controlled" by every special interest with deep pockets and a big lobby. The solution to that is more free market capitalism and less government power.
Geez, do you really need the context spelled out even more clearly? The distinction I was drawing was between economically more rational and morally more enlightened. That is, many societies and producers abandoned forced labor for economic reasons, not for moral or political reasons. Conversely, slavery is a results of political oppression, not of free markets.
Actually, Adam Smith also argued that slavery wasn't just a moral evil, but that it was also economically irrational. And history has proven him right: in most places in the world, forced labor ended not because societies became more enlightened, but because it simply wasn't economically rational.
Quite the opposite: Smith's main point is that free markets punish lying and sociopathic behavior, because people don't voluntarily choose to do transactions with people who engage in such behavior.
I don't get your point. By the time Britain appeared as a world power, China had already missed its opportunities by many centuries.
Basically, yes: China stagnated because it didn't take advantage of its knowledge and skills. And it didn't take advantage of it because there was little incentive to doing so for individuals: mandarins aren't rewarded for risk taking and innovation, they are rewarded for obedience.
I'm not sure I get your point. Why would the price of the raw product directly relate to the price at the pump?
A second problem with that reasoning is that the market in oil and gas simply isn't a free market, it is highly controlled by governments from beginning to end.
Oil companies have nice profit margins (around 16% industry average), but they also face high risks. That's similar to dentists, physicians, and tax preparers. It's far below Apple. And if you want your share in that profit margin, just invest in them; they are mostly publicly traded.
Take your own advice. If you read his book, you'll actually see that your full of it.
That is utter nonsense. Adam Smith goes out of his way to describe how government regulations are abused again and again for what we now call rent seeking. While Adam Smith wasn't categorically opposed to all government functions (he favored publicly financed defense and justice systems), he certainly did not hold the beliefs you attribute to him.
This kind of ludicrous horror story gets invented time and again by opponents of free markets and rent seekers and they make no sense. How is the would-be profiteer actually going to make a business out of that and earn a profit?
Captialism is necessary, though not sufficient, for a free society.
We have plenty of writers, including scifi writers, that think that way too. Fortunately, it doesn't dominate our culture like it has dominated Chinese culture; misguided views like these are responsible for the long periods of stagnation and weakness that China has experienced.
There is no reason to teach BASIC anymore, in particular the obsolete forms implemented by DiscoRunner.
There are numerous programming languages you can teach kids. Python is probably a reasonable choice, but there are even simpler ones out there if you like.
That's utterly irrelevant to the point at hand, namely that roaming costs within the same provider disappeared within the US on their own, without regulation.
First of all, Canada isn't the US, so I don't see why you keep talking about the US.
Second, I think we pretty conclusively determined how free.fr can offer those cheap plans: the French government subsidizes them by forcing roaming arrangements on the former state monopoly, Orange, and by having subsidized Orange itself even after it became a private company. That is, free.fr wasn't created by regulation, it was created by a combination of deregulation (good) and crony capitalism (bad).
Third, that has a lot to do with slow economic growth and high taxes, because the kind of economic dirigisme that lets the French government do popular things like create cheap cell phone plans out of nothing also leads to high taxes and slow growth.
OK, so you are a privileged upper middle class guy with tons of communications options. And you are whining because government doesn't give you cheaper cell phone service. Do you want a free pony too?