The article was sufficient to demonstrate racial bias even with virtual participants.
No, for that, there would have had to be control experiments that they didn't do. Were the black characters as life-like? Were they as visible?
And why would Italian psychology students have much of any bias against black skin color anyway? And why would these results apply to any other demographic or nationality?
What is the deal with the general public's apathy when it comes to NSA/GCQH/GCSB/etc ?
What exactly do you expect spy organizations to do? Why do you think we sink so much money into them.? As long as each organization spies on other countries and they don't exchange data, they are doing their job. The problem is domestic spying, or trying to circumvent rules against domestic spying by exchanging data.
Exactly this. I suspect that most people who say "just ignore them" have had, at worst, someone say something mildly mean to them online
Twitter and Facebook are places for minor celebrities and social justice warriors to stir controversy, get exposure, and troll people. I see no reason to waste any law enforcement time on policing that. You don't want people to send you mean tweets? Don't go on Twitter or Facebook with your real name, simple as that.
It's sort of like the people that say "Oh, measles is kind of like having a cold. I had a cold once and it wasn't too bad. Therefore measles isn't too bad either."
I had measles and it wasn't so bad. In fact, it wasn't so bad for any of the kids around me either.
But your analogy is a good one: you are hysterical about measles, just like you are hysterical about rude speech.
Curt Shilling is the megalomaniac who thought he could transition from jock to major gaming mogul? The guy who caused tax payers to lose about 75 million dollars? Nasty comments about his daughter are out of bounds. But Curt Shilling himself should be ostracized and ridiculed anywhere he goes.
We've had such systems in the past, they weren't superior.
Yes, policing was private. I don't see what basis you have for saying that "it wasn't superior".
As for the HOA example, I'd argue that it IS a form of government. It might not normally be able to arrest you, but it can certainly take your house away.
That statement makes no sense.
Again, any corporation capable of overseeing pollution would be effectively a government agency, and subject to lobbying like the regular government. Just not as out in the open.
No, that is absolutely false. Corporations have far fewer rights and powers, and they are responsible to their owners in ways that government is not responsible to its citizens.
Those of us who like living in better than caveman conditions. State of the technology doesn't allow completely non-polluting industry.
It isn't about "state of the art", it's about millions of people dying from massive pollution and living in squalid conditions throughout the 19th and 20th century due to massive levels of pollution being permitted by government.
And why should "those of us" that make your choices have a right to impose the choices on those of us who might have different preferences? Except for possibly a few air pollutants, what possible justification is there to impose national standards on any of this?
Which isn't exactly an argument that targets me, you know? I'm the one that opened this up saying that we need to stop giving them license to pollute,
No, what you argue is that government should continue to give businesses a blanket license to pollute, you simply haggle about the degree and you assert vehemently and without any evidence that the license businesses get is "science based".
That you disagree with that is fine, but just straight up accusing me of wanting more government control is right out, when my proposal is for, ultimately, less control by the government.
The problem is that your "proposals" are nothing more than wishful thinking. Environmental regulation is a tug of war between industry lobbies, environmental lobbies, unions, and a few other groups. None of those groups represent scientific truth, and none of them have the best interest of the American people at heart.
I also reject your 'no true scotsman' attempt on me.
Stating that you are not a libertarian isn't a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. You made a claim from authority ("I'm a libertarian") and an ad hominem ("you're an anarchist"). You're objectively not a libertarian because you repeatedly argue from the point of view of having government impose policies for the good of society or the majority.
Just to be clear, I think what you're missing is that "private ownership" and "markets" don't mean everybody for themselves on their private plot of land. It means a combination of individual ownership, joint ownership, and easements and licenses.
One example setup (albeit not a very good one) would be roughly if you took the EPA-as-is, separated its budget and revenue from the entire rest of the government, devised articles of incorporation, made all Americans shareholders, and made its officers subject to the same kind of accountability to shareholders as corporate officers. Rather lobbying and nebulous budgetary processes, you'd end up with an EPA that is directly responsible to the American people and whose revenue is directly given to the American people. I don't think that would be the best private entity to replace the EPA, but it would be a simple structure that would give us direct democracy on environmental issues and not be subject to politicians acting in response to lobbyists.
Of course, direct democracy is something progressives loathe because they believe the American voter is stupid.
you should have to pay for that right, just like you pay for the right to cross their land, mine their land, or do anything else to it.
Which is what I proposed, so why are you complaining?
No, they are not paying the property owner, they are paying fees to the government, i.e., other people. The problem is that those other people have no particular interest in the land, but they do have a lot of interest in making more money.
Okay, read the pollution section from the ebook. I'll summarize my thoughts: 1. Just who do you propose to sell the rivers to, where they can still be used for trade, wildlife preservation, and such without massive, massive issues with negotiating with, potentially, thousands of owners?
Private ownership doesn't mean individual ownership. I am a private owner of a share in my HOA, but I don't own any particular part of the common areas of the land. That HOA frequently holds democratic votes and makes decisions that I may not agree with. But it is still very different from a governmental entity.
Most likely, a river would be held by an individual entity similar to an HOA, with shareholders. The shares might be tied to adjoining land, or they might be freely traded. (Note that transitioning from the current system to such a system would raise many complex questions, but that doesn't change the fact that in the long run such a system would be preferable to what we have.)
2. How do you arrange it so that companies are liable for their pollution when it's basically impossible to point your finger at a specific factory having caused you harm, or making it so easy that anybody who gets a cough is suing everybody and clogging the courts up?
You're still thinking in terms of "causing harm" rather than "trespass", and you're still confusing individual ownership with private ownership. Any emission, whether harmful or not, is "trespass" by default.
What I'm getting at is that my 'solution' is to make the government the overseer
Yes, and that's the problem: by making the EPA a governmental entity, it is subject to lobbying and political pressure; money it takes in gets funneled to other programs, and it isn't forced to make economic tradeoffs when it imposes costs. Furthermore, it imposes one-size-fits-all regulations both when they are necessary (some air pollutants) and when they are utterly unjustified (soil, river, noise).
I have no idea what the optimal arrangement of private environmental regulatory mechanisms would be; optimizing such mechanisms is itself a big part of markets. I'm sure that much of the regulation of the EPA could easily be handled at the local level. Even air isn't the global thing you presume it to be for most pollutants, and markets could find much more nuanced and reasonable mechanisms than what we have. We might well end up with highly polluting industries concentrated in some valley that air never makes it out of, rather than scattering it across the landscape.
I'll summarize: We need... It needs... It needs...
You're already starting with the premise that the mechanism for environmental policy need to be manually designed, centrally planned, and micromanaged. No, "we" don't need any of these things. "We" simply need the principle that we respect each other's property rights and that any intrusion into each other's property rights needs a contractual basis. Anything else follows from that.
Furthermore, what you are really asking for isn't a scheme that works, but a scheme that works subject to numerous boundary conditions that are themselves violations of libertarian principles. Finally, change to the EPA will necessarily piss off lots of people and break a lot of things, so a reform proposal is even harder.
1. We need a policy that is 'simple' enough for business
I strongly encourage additional attention and noise to the issue for full on public utility regulation. Here's to moving the US into a First World nation with First World utilities like power, water, and real broadband - wired and wireless.
Most "First World nations" do not treat phone or Internet as public utilities.
And power and water utilities are ripoffs as well, but you wouldn't know that if you live in your mother's basement or are a pampered city dweller.
Typical idiocy. Your "evidence" is an article in a right-wing newpaper that doesn't even compare the waiting times with the US system.
Do you have anything to say other than ad hominems?
The British model beats your crappy system in every way,
Be that as it may, you are ignoring the simple fact that the US already has a vast public health care system like the NHS that consumes about half of the entire US health care spending. The US spends more per capita across the entire population for just its public health care system than the UK spends on its entire health care system.
Therefore, the idea that what ails the US is a lack of an NHS-like system is clearly wrong. If going to an NHS-like solution would work in the US, the US could simply extend coverage of its existing public health care system to the entire population without any changes to the private system and lower taxes at the same time. But the fact is that, for whatever reason, the existing public health care system in the US sucks badly and is highly inefficient, and extending it to the entire population would just not work.
I'm not talking about some drastic reform like the creation of the EPA was. I'm talking about reforming the EPA in ways that I believe will actually INCREASE freedom, REDUCE regulation, encourage lowering pollution more(via eliminating grandfathering), while encouraging new construction because the EPA isn't setting ridiculous rules about pollution.
That is intrinsically impossible. The EPA can no more make rational tradeoffs about pollution for the entire country than the USSR could fix prices rationally: the EPA simply doesn't have the necessary information, conditions are far too variable across the country, and the people inside the EPA simply have no incentive to do the right thing. EPA employees have no direct interest in the outcomes of what they do; they get rewarded based on arbitrary administrative criteria, whether they please their political masters, and the ability to land lucrative private sector jobs after leaving the EPA. How is such an incentive system ever going to produce any kind of rational environmental policy?
'proto-fascist' means you either are completely misunderstanding me, deliberately or not, or don't realize what fascist means.
Fascist economics means strongly regulated markets based on what politics decides is in the interest of society as a whole (a "mixed economy"). That is what you are advocating, isn't it? I chose the words carefully, because market regulation is an intrinsic violation of individual liberties, no matter how you dress it up, and it has a tendency to spiral out of control, which is exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930's. Read Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom".
Okay, how do you propose to work this? I decide to heat my home using an open coal fire. The smoke can be seen for miles, everybody is hacking, but it's my decision, right? How do you impose the cost of everybody else's sickness on my decision?
By default, you don't have a right to pollute other people's private property at all, whether it's their air, their land, or their water; you should have to pay for that right, just like you pay for the right to cross their land, mine their land, or do anything else to it. Right now, the EPA gives you a free license to pollute and kill other people at no cost to you using some blanket standards that are too strict in some areas and too lenient in others.
Okay, build a coherent plan and/or example of how your system will work. Because it's sounding a bit like you're proposing to sell the air to private concerns. I think I'd rather see your actual view on a solution/plan before I speculate further.
There are plenty of books on that. Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" explains one approach, there are others. The point is that, no matter what alternative you choose, "externalities" are not an immutable fact, as you seem to presume, they are an artifact of how we deal with the environment right now.
Things like pollution are called "externalities" and the free market has no way of dealing with them because pollution affects people who neither produced nor bought the product and thus are invisible to the free market.
Those resources are invisible to the free market because government has removed them from the free market and manages them by what amounts to central planning. There is no logical reason why that should be so. Make those resources part of the market and there are no externalities anymore: all costs are now internal to the market. That is what "we strike such balances by market mechanisms" means.
It's always amusing when free market fanatics don't know the very principles of what they advocate.
As I was saying: The problem you're having in understanding this is because you are completely stuck in the false idea that the environment is this nebulous entity that exists completely apart from normal economics.
Surely you mean free market politicians and corporate lobbyists.
There is nothing "free market" about politicians because the money politicians manage is obtained through compulsion, not voluntary exchanges.
As for setting a price on human life, I'll repeat: IT ALREADY HAPPENS. Realistically speaking, you can't operate without putting a price on it.
You simply don't get it: I'm not objecting to setting a price, I'm objecting to who sets it. You want corrupt politicians and lobbyists to set the price and simply cannot conceive of any alternative.
So add it to your pile of apparently useless dislikes, seeing as how you haven't managed to suggest an alternative.
I have suggested an alternative, you are simply too locked into your dirigisme mindset to even perceive it when someone states it clearly: the market should set the price for pollution by privatizing environmental resources.
I mean, we need to harvest resources if we're to have an economy(which is a good thing), the trick is to maximize the economy while minimizing pollution, with the goal of maximizing quality of life. That generally means pollution controls more than telling a company they can harvest in one spot but not another.
"We need to", "we have", "we minimize", "we maximize", "we tell": get out of your goddamn ochlocratic and proto-fascist economic mindset in which government forces a single policy on everybody "for the good of society".
In a free country, people make individual choices, and free markets aggregate those choices into overall policy. That is how "we" should maximize quality of life while minimizing pollution. Having a bunch of regulators sitting in a room, subject to personal vanity, career pressures, and lobbying is not how you optimize anything, it's a recipe for economic stagnation or worse.
Happens every day. NHTSA rates the value at saving a human life (VSL) at $9.1M [nhtsa.gov].
Yes it does, as does government price fixing for lots of other things. Do you like paying too much for sugar because of government price fixing? Do you like the fact that you subsidize oil production to keep oil cheap? I certainly don't.
And that's why I also don't like the price for pollution or human lives to be fixed by corrupt politicians and lobbyists either, which is exactly what you are advocating.
This is 'simply' an attempt to render an external cost not paid by the business doing the industry, an internal one, so they have incentive to reduce their pollution.
The only reason the cost is "external" to the economy is because the government has removed a large chunk of natural resources from the economy and is managing them through "regulations", which is really just another name for "central planning". The result is that instead of businesses paying actual costs for the pollution they impose, some businesses pay way too little, and others pay way too much, and the environment is far worse off than it otherwise would be.
but I do take issue when you criticize people for making the hard decisions you prefer to pretend don't exist.
These decision are hard, which is precisely why they should be left to the people; you want those decisions to be made by corrupt politicians and corporate lobbyists.
Just as an example, we need to decide how much to spend mitigating pollution.
"We" need to decide that no more than "we" need to decide the price of iPhones or tofu. The only fair and non-corrupt mechanism by which "we" decide how much to spend on anything is a free market.
So there needs to be a balance, and to find the right balance you have to study and know how much you value things.
That's the argument central planners made and it doesn't work. We strike such balances by market mechanisms, because if we try to strike them through political processes, the end result is invariably highly inefficient and corrupt.
The problem you're having in understanding this is because you are completely stuck in the false idea that the environment is this nebulous entity that exists completely apart from normal economics. What the environment actually is is a large set of valuable resources that the government performs central planning for, largely in response to corporate lobbying.
You don't think that the number of people with competitive broadband depends heavily on the definition of "broadband"?
No, I think you got the dependency and the definition wrong.
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD and 25Mbps for UHD. If we want to stick to a single stream at SD, it's great, though.
The argument for government support for broadband for the home is that people need it for education and jobs. For that, a single SD stream is sufficient, and for that, almost all Americans have multiple providers.
Your definition of broadband means that you are effectively arguing that the US government should engage in a massive regulatory scheme so that pampered upper middle class folks and their kids can retreat nightly to watching separate UHD video on their subsidized Internet connections, and that is just wrong. Even if you accept the notion of positive rights, there is no rational policy objective served by that, and it effectively ends up taxing poorer people to give already well off people a nice entertainment option.
Furthermore, many of those subsidize broadband, so it's actually a lot more expensive than it seems.
It's these kinds of vague, hand-wavy assertions that drive me nuts. This stuff is just numbers, and it's knowable. Which countries and how much?
No, it's not "knowable" because money is fungible. Subsidies occur in the form of cheap loans, and loan guarantees, easements, contractual commitments that don't show up as debt, R&D contracts related to infrastructure, free provision of "public" television, and many other forms. A lot of infrastructure was handed to companies in places like Germany as part of privatization of national telecoms. But there are more obvious forms too: Germany used a massive surtax on income in order to deploy a fibre network throughout the country in the 1990s (a lousy investment).
They have to keep their equipment and services competitive with whatever a new competitor might bring online, but they can keep their prices at monopoly levels until that competitor actually does come online.
Yes, that's what I said.
The fact that Comcast has to keep up efficiency doesn't result in all that much benefit the end user if it all ends up in monopoly profits.
It ends up in enormous benefit to the end user compared to a government monopoly, because with a government monopoly, the user ends up paying monopoly prices and receives outdated service. That was the norm with US and European national telecoms until they got privatized. In both places, you couldn't even legally connect an analog modem to the phone lines. The Internet didn't take off on either continent until they were privatized.
Note that, ironically, Germans are making "grass is greener" arguments about the US:
USA, Japan, Schweiz - in vielen LÃndern ist das Internet schneller als bei uns. Millionen Haushalte in Deutschland haben gar keinen Zugriff auf einen ausreichend schnellen Zugang, um die datenintensiven Netzanwendungen der Gegenwart zu nutzen.
The usual: Lives lost, work days lost due to extra illness, medical care, damage to infrastructure and habitats, etc...
In order to translate "lives lost" into money, you need to start by assigning a value to a human being, a completely arbitrary number. Predicting extra illnesses relies on collecting data from medical studies subject to massive publication bias and never designed for that purpose. And it gets worse from there. I mean, we don't even manage to price parking tickets or speeding tickets correctly.
Then you're not thinking it through very well, because we do it all the time.
No, you are not thinking it through very well. Yes, we do it all the time and we are doing it wrong. That is why people are getting upset with the regulatory overreach we are experiencing now. People are faced with arbitrary fines completely out of proportion to any harm they could conceivably be causing. And by "people", I don't just mean large corporations, this goes all the way down to home owners. Regulatory penalties are as arbitrary as civil asset forfeiture. These fines don't get set based on sound science and economics, they get set based on attempts to raise revenue and achieve policy goals unrelated to pollution or saving lives.
Incidentally, half of the US medical system is already publicly financed and government-run. It covers only about 28% of the population and is still more than 3x as expensive as the NHS. So, obviously, the problem with the high cost of medical care in the US is not primarily private insurance, it's the government-run system.
I don't doubt that those contribute significantly (although nobody seems to want to put up real numbers to back up the claim), but even in the absence of regulation, wiring up a large geographical space is bloody expensive.
Why do you need to "wire up a large geographical space"? You can be a small-town local ISP, pull wires through existing tunnels, rent wires from the electric or water utilities, use microwave and WiMax links and distribution, etc. (all things small companies in European cities that I have lived in have done).
I think this hinges pretty heavily on the definition of "broadband."
Really? I don't believe that's true. Netflix works fine at 3 Mbps, what more do you want?
but kind of laughable when you compare the results to other civilized countries.
Having lived in several "other civilized countries", I think US broadband is pretty good and cheap. Furthermore, many of those subsidize broadband, so it's actually a lot more expensive than it seems.
That needs to be phrased very carefully. It needs to be able to do it more efficiently than Comcast at its equilibrium competitive price.
The cost of making a product is independent of the price you later decide to charge for it.
What Comcast currently charges isn't the rate you have to beat.
Did I say it was? What I said was that if another provider can provide the service more efficiently, then they will enter the market. At that point, Comcast's prices would change from monopoly pricing to competitive pricing. The reason why that matters is not pricing, but that Comcast at least has to keep their equipment and services competitive. A government-mandated monopoly doesn't even have to do that.
You should not have to pay transport costs for the power you produce, because that power doesn't have to run back to the power plant and then back out.
What you should have to pay for, however, is for the wires that run into your home and provide you the option to get electricity off the grid, day or night, when your solar system fails.
It's telling that you can't identify anything that's actually inaccurate in my post.
You rattle off a number of statistics ("much better outcomes, much wider coverage, much more availability and it's cheaper ") that have nothing to do with what I was referring to: waiting times and poor service.
Slashdot Mirror
No, for that, there would have had to be control experiments that they didn't do. Were the black characters as life-like? Were they as visible?
And why would Italian psychology students have much of any bias against black skin color anyway? And why would these results apply to any other demographic or nationality?
It's finally here. Just after the year of the Linux Desktop!
Is that like an RC car with a camera, perhaps?
What exactly do you expect spy organizations to do? Why do you think we sink so much money into them.? As long as each organization spies on other countries and they don't exchange data, they are doing their job. The problem is domestic spying, or trying to circumvent rules against domestic spying by exchanging data.
Twitter and Facebook are places for minor celebrities and social justice warriors to stir controversy, get exposure, and troll people. I see no reason to waste any law enforcement time on policing that. You don't want people to send you mean tweets? Don't go on Twitter or Facebook with your real name, simple as that.
I had measles and it wasn't so bad. In fact, it wasn't so bad for any of the kids around me either.
But your analogy is a good one: you are hysterical about measles, just like you are hysterical about rude speech.
Curt Shilling is the megalomaniac who thought he could transition from jock to major gaming mogul? The guy who caused tax payers to lose about 75 million dollars? Nasty comments about his daughter are out of bounds. But Curt Shilling himself should be ostracized and ridiculed anywhere he goes.
You keep demonstrating your ignorance.
That is only $80 billion out of a $1.1 trillion budget, so that's obviously not responsible.
The notion that a government service paid for with mandatory taxes "competes" with private healthcare is ludicrous.
We'll take your advice for what it's worth... nothing.
Yes, policing was private. I don't see what basis you have for saying that "it wasn't superior".
That statement makes no sense.
No, that is absolutely false. Corporations have far fewer rights and powers, and they are responsible to their owners in ways that government is not responsible to its citizens.
It isn't about "state of the art", it's about millions of people dying from massive pollution and living in squalid conditions throughout the 19th and 20th century due to massive levels of pollution being permitted by government.
And why should "those of us" that make your choices have a right to impose the choices on those of us who might have different preferences? Except for possibly a few air pollutants, what possible justification is there to impose national standards on any of this?
No, what you argue is that government should continue to give businesses a blanket license to pollute, you simply haggle about the degree and you assert vehemently and without any evidence that the license businesses get is "science based".
The problem is that your "proposals" are nothing more than wishful thinking. Environmental regulation is a tug of war between industry lobbies, environmental lobbies, unions, and a few other groups. None of those groups represent scientific truth, and none of them have the best interest of the American people at heart.
Stating that you are not a libertarian isn't a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. You made a claim from authority ("I'm a libertarian") and an ad hominem ("you're an anarchist"). You're objectively not a libertarian because you repeatedly argue from the point of view of having government impose policies for the good of society or the majority.
Just to be clear, I think what you're missing is that "private ownership" and "markets" don't mean everybody for themselves on their private plot of land. It means a combination of individual ownership, joint ownership, and easements and licenses.
One example setup (albeit not a very good one) would be roughly if you took the EPA-as-is, separated its budget and revenue from the entire rest of the government, devised articles of incorporation, made all Americans shareholders, and made its officers subject to the same kind of accountability to shareholders as corporate officers. Rather lobbying and nebulous budgetary processes, you'd end up with an EPA that is directly responsible to the American people and whose revenue is directly given to the American people. I don't think that would be the best private entity to replace the EPA, but it would be a simple structure that would give us direct democracy on environmental issues and not be subject to politicians acting in response to lobbyists.
Of course, direct democracy is something progressives loathe because they believe the American voter is stupid.
No, they are not paying the property owner, they are paying fees to the government, i.e., other people. The problem is that those other people have no particular interest in the land, but they do have a lot of interest in making more money.
Private ownership doesn't mean individual ownership. I am a private owner of a share in my HOA, but I don't own any particular part of the common areas of the land. That HOA frequently holds democratic votes and makes decisions that I may not agree with. But it is still very different from a governmental entity.
Most likely, a river would be held by an individual entity similar to an HOA, with shareholders. The shares might be tied to adjoining land, or they might be freely traded. (Note that transitioning from the current system to such a system would raise many complex questions, but that doesn't change the fact that in the long run such a system would be preferable to what we have.)
You're still thinking in terms of "causing harm" rather than "trespass", and you're still confusing individual ownership with private ownership. Any emission, whether harmful or not, is "trespass" by default.
Yes, and that's the problem: by making the EPA a governmental entity, it is subject to lobbying and political pressure; money it takes in gets funneled to other programs, and it isn't forced to make economic tradeoffs when it imposes costs. Furthermore, it imposes one-size-fits-all regulations both when they are necessary (some air pollutants) and when they are utterly unjustified (soil, river, noise).
I have no idea what the optimal arrangement of private environmental regulatory mechanisms would be; optimizing such mechanisms is itself a big part of markets. I'm sure that much of the regulation of the EPA could easily be handled at the local level. Even air isn't the global thing you presume it to be for most pollutants, and markets could find much more nuanced and reasonable mechanisms than what we have. We might well end up with highly polluting industries concentrated in some valley that air never makes it out of, rather than scattering it across the landscape.
You're already starting with the premise that the mechanism for environmental policy need to be manually designed, centrally planned, and micromanaged. No, "we" don't need any of these things. "We" simply need the principle that we respect each other's property rights and that any intrusion into each other's property rights needs a contractual basis. Anything else follows from that.
Furthermore, what you are really asking for isn't a scheme that works, but a scheme that works subject to numerous boundary conditions that are themselves violations of libertarian principles. Finally, change to the EPA will necessarily piss off lots of people and break a lot of things, so a reform proposal is even harder.
Most "First World nations" do not treat phone or Internet as public utilities.
And power and water utilities are ripoffs as well, but you wouldn't know that if you live in your mother's basement or are a pampered city dweller.
Do you have anything to say other than ad hominems?
Be that as it may, you are ignoring the simple fact that the US already has a vast public health care system like the NHS that consumes about half of the entire US health care spending. The US spends more per capita across the entire population for just its public health care system than the UK spends on its entire health care system.
Therefore, the idea that what ails the US is a lack of an NHS-like system is clearly wrong. If going to an NHS-like solution would work in the US, the US could simply extend coverage of its existing public health care system to the entire population without any changes to the private system and lower taxes at the same time. But the fact is that, for whatever reason, the existing public health care system in the US sucks badly and is highly inefficient, and extending it to the entire population would just not work.
That is intrinsically impossible. The EPA can no more make rational tradeoffs about pollution for the entire country than the USSR could fix prices rationally: the EPA simply doesn't have the necessary information, conditions are far too variable across the country, and the people inside the EPA simply have no incentive to do the right thing. EPA employees have no direct interest in the outcomes of what they do; they get rewarded based on arbitrary administrative criteria, whether they please their political masters, and the ability to land lucrative private sector jobs after leaving the EPA. How is such an incentive system ever going to produce any kind of rational environmental policy?
Fascist economics means strongly regulated markets based on what politics decides is in the interest of society as a whole (a "mixed economy"). That is what you are advocating, isn't it? I chose the words carefully, because market regulation is an intrinsic violation of individual liberties, no matter how you dress it up, and it has a tendency to spiral out of control, which is exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930's. Read Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom".
By default, you don't have a right to pollute other people's private property at all, whether it's their air, their land, or their water; you should have to pay for that right, just like you pay for the right to cross their land, mine their land, or do anything else to it. Right now, the EPA gives you a free license to pollute and kill other people at no cost to you using some blanket standards that are too strict in some areas and too lenient in others.
There are plenty of books on that. Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" explains one approach, there are others. The point is that, no matter what alternative you choose, "externalities" are not an immutable fact, as you seem to presume, they are an artifact of how we deal with the environment right now.
Those resources are invisible to the free market because government has removed them from the free market and manages them by what amounts to central planning. There is no logical reason why that should be so. Make those resources part of the market and there are no externalities anymore: all costs are now internal to the market. That is what "we strike such balances by market mechanisms" means.
As I was saying: The problem you're having in understanding this is because you are completely stuck in the false idea that the environment is this nebulous entity that exists completely apart from normal economics.
There is nothing "free market" about politicians because the money politicians manage is obtained through compulsion, not voluntary exchanges.
You simply don't get it: I'm not objecting to setting a price, I'm objecting to who sets it. You want corrupt politicians and lobbyists to set the price and simply cannot conceive of any alternative.
I have suggested an alternative, you are simply too locked into your dirigisme mindset to even perceive it when someone states it clearly: the market should set the price for pollution by privatizing environmental resources.
"We need to", "we have", "we minimize", "we maximize", "we tell": get out of your goddamn ochlocratic and proto-fascist economic mindset in which government forces a single policy on everybody "for the good of society".
In a free country, people make individual choices, and free markets aggregate those choices into overall policy. That is how "we" should maximize quality of life while minimizing pollution. Having a bunch of regulators sitting in a room, subject to personal vanity, career pressures, and lobbying is not how you optimize anything, it's a recipe for economic stagnation or worse.
Yes it does, as does government price fixing for lots of other things. Do you like paying too much for sugar because of government price fixing? Do you like the fact that you subsidize oil production to keep oil cheap? I certainly don't.
And that's why I also don't like the price for pollution or human lives to be fixed by corrupt politicians and lobbyists either, which is exactly what you are advocating.
The only reason the cost is "external" to the economy is because the government has removed a large chunk of natural resources from the economy and is managing them through "regulations", which is really just another name for "central planning". The result is that instead of businesses paying actual costs for the pollution they impose, some businesses pay way too little, and others pay way too much, and the environment is far worse off than it otherwise would be.
These decision are hard, which is precisely why they should be left to the people; you want those decisions to be made by corrupt politicians and corporate lobbyists.
"We" need to decide that no more than "we" need to decide the price of iPhones or tofu. The only fair and non-corrupt mechanism by which "we" decide how much to spend on anything is a free market.
That's the argument central planners made and it doesn't work. We strike such balances by market mechanisms, because if we try to strike them through political processes, the end result is invariably highly inefficient and corrupt.
The problem you're having in understanding this is because you are completely stuck in the false idea that the environment is this nebulous entity that exists completely apart from normal economics. What the environment actually is is a large set of valuable resources that the government performs central planning for, largely in response to corporate lobbying.
No, I think you got the dependency and the definition wrong.
The argument for government support for broadband for the home is that people need it for education and jobs. For that, a single SD stream is sufficient, and for that, almost all Americans have multiple providers.
Your definition of broadband means that you are effectively arguing that the US government should engage in a massive regulatory scheme so that pampered upper middle class folks and their kids can retreat nightly to watching separate UHD video on their subsidized Internet connections, and that is just wrong. Even if you accept the notion of positive rights, there is no rational policy objective served by that, and it effectively ends up taxing poorer people to give already well off people a nice entertainment option.
No, it's not "knowable" because money is fungible. Subsidies occur in the form of cheap loans, and loan guarantees, easements, contractual commitments that don't show up as debt, R&D contracts related to infrastructure, free provision of "public" television, and many other forms. A lot of infrastructure was handed to companies in places like Germany as part of privatization of national telecoms. But there are more obvious forms too: Germany used a massive surtax on income in order to deploy a fibre network throughout the country in the 1990s (a lousy investment).
Yes, that's what I said.
It ends up in enormous benefit to the end user compared to a government monopoly, because with a government monopoly, the user ends up paying monopoly prices and receives outdated service. That was the norm with US and European national telecoms until they got privatized. In both places, you couldn't even legally connect an analog modem to the phone lines. The Internet didn't take off on either continent until they were privatized.
Note that, ironically, Germans are making "grass is greener" arguments about the US:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt...
In order to translate "lives lost" into money, you need to start by assigning a value to a human being, a completely arbitrary number. Predicting extra illnesses relies on collecting data from medical studies subject to massive publication bias and never designed for that purpose. And it gets worse from there. I mean, we don't even manage to price parking tickets or speeding tickets correctly.
No, you are not thinking it through very well. Yes, we do it all the time and we are doing it wrong. That is why people are getting upset with the regulatory overreach we are experiencing now. People are faced with arbitrary fines completely out of proportion to any harm they could conceivably be causing. And by "people", I don't just mean large corporations, this goes all the way down to home owners. Regulatory penalties are as arbitrary as civil asset forfeiture. These fines don't get set based on sound science and economics, they get set based on attempts to raise revenue and achieve policy goals unrelated to pollution or saving lives.
Really? And what would the basis for these calculations be?
I think the very idea that you anybody can assign a meaningful, fixed dollar amount to pollution is ludicrous.
Incidentally, half of the US medical system is already publicly financed and government-run. It covers only about 28% of the population and is still more than 3x as expensive as the NHS. So, obviously, the problem with the high cost of medical care in the US is not primarily private insurance, it's the government-run system.
Why do you need to "wire up a large geographical space"? You can be a small-town local ISP, pull wires through existing tunnels, rent wires from the electric or water utilities, use microwave and WiMax links and distribution, etc. (all things small companies in European cities that I have lived in have done).
Really? I don't believe that's true. Netflix works fine at 3 Mbps, what more do you want?
Having lived in several "other civilized countries", I think US broadband is pretty good and cheap. Furthermore, many of those subsidize broadband, so it's actually a lot more expensive than it seems.
The cost of making a product is independent of the price you later decide to charge for it.
Did I say it was? What I said was that if another provider can provide the service more efficiently, then they will enter the market. At that point, Comcast's prices would change from monopoly pricing to competitive pricing. The reason why that matters is not pricing, but that Comcast at least has to keep their equipment and services competitive. A government-mandated monopoly doesn't even have to do that.
What you should have to pay for, however, is for the wires that run into your home and provide you the option to get electricity off the grid, day or night, when your solar system fails.
And these numbers come... out of your ass?
You rattle off a number of statistics ("much better outcomes, much wider coverage, much more availability and it's cheaper ") that have nothing to do with what I was referring to: waiting times and poor service.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Not at all: there are plenty of things wrong with the US health care system. But adopting the shitty British model is not the answer.