Hey, I'm as corruptable as the next guy. To paraphrase Gandalf, "I would assume power with the goal of doing good. But it cannot be used for such."
You're absolutely correct, of course, the Fed.Gov has no power to force the states to do anything. However, since 1794 with the Federal tax on whisky, and that little bru-ha-ha around 1861, not having the power grated to them has had little to no actual effect on their actions.
You might find _How Capitalism Saved America_ by Thomas DiLorenzo to be of interest. It's clear that you are thinking much more about things than some of the other nay-sayers here, I would be interested in your reaction to his discussions.
Are you honestly telling me multiple companies are all going to lay sewage pipes so that you can choose which one to hook your toilets up to?
No, because I don't know how to do that. I am also not going to tell you that they won't, which is a judgement that you are making out of hand.
What I will tell you is that there are alternatives to sewage lines. Chemical toilets, composting toilets and the like have been around for a very long time.
The provision of such services through taxation creates a situation of monopoly because there is always a legal restriction placed upon the service at the same time. For example, a San Jose, California, professor at SJSU was doing a course on recycling. The entirety of the "garbage" his household generated was about one pint per trash pickup cycle. He was taking that in to the school to demonstrate to his class what was possible, and thus thought he didn't need to pay for the garbage can provided by the city.
No Such Luck! The city prosecuted him for failure to pay for the trash service he wasn't using.
Do I get to not pay school taxes if I do not send a kid to government school? Do I get to not pay sewage taxes if I use a composting toilet? Do I get to not pay for trash pickup if I generate no trash?
Government granted monopolies create inefficiency not only in the usual "waste, fraud and abuse" that government efforts are always rife with, they also prevent innovation by removing money that might have been spent on replacing that government service with something valued higher by the consumer.
Roads? By Cromm, not that old standby. Have you read none of the arguments already published on that matter? Here, have a couple:
Hmmm. and statist utopias are better because.....?
Hahahaha! Well said!
It is the statists who promise Utopia with their planning, their bureaucratic management, their "we can do it right this time, with the right people in charge" claims. Utopia was the creation of Plato, who argued that the best humans could attain would be done through incorruptible and all-powerful philosopher Kings.
People who advocate liberty do not promise Utopia, never have. They just point out that people thrive when allowed to interact voluntarily rather than at gun point. I think what statists fear is that they might have to live with their bad choices, instead of having BigMommyGovernment to coddle them.
Oh, oops, that's right. Food is provided by many different providers, suppliers, packagers. Why didn't it make your list of important things? It's only with the establishment of the FDA and other redistribution and regulation agencies that corporate Agriculture has been able to consolidate and create monopolies.
Gee, there we go again! Government intrusion creates the very problems of consolidation and monopoly that get blamed on the "free market", long after the "free" part has been regulated out of existence.
Exactly. Without government monopoly grants, even an established enterprise must constantly be on guard against innovators who promise better service, even if it means a customer would have to pay a premium price.
If price were the only consideration of buyers, there would be only one kind of anything sold. But some people buy IP service to their home for $9.99/month, others $59.99/month, others $299.99/month. Obviously, there is some other consideration that simply price. There is no engineering reason why telephone service cannot be provided in just as great a variety except that the barrier to entry is political, not practical.
Which is why the established players love government monopoly grants, licencing, protectionist tarriffs, and all the other games merchantilists play to not have to actually provide a good service that people want.
I know it's easy to get tricked into the "high entry cost" myth, so please bear with me.
Innovation happens because some shmoe "entrepreneur" smells a profit. If "entry costs" are high, it will require something extra to enter that market. Usually, this is done through innovation rather than trying to beat the established player at their own game.
Wired vs. wireless is a good example of this. Yet still, local governments have extended their monopoly grants to cell phone providers to prevent that very innovation. So is cable TV, which can provide telephone service as easily as it can provide IP, but is almost everywhere itself granted local monopoly status.
I can assure you that the "high cost of entry" myth has been well thrashed since before the time of Adam Smith. After all, without the East India Company, who would risk sending a ship to the other side of the world for something like tea?
If people consider that providing "uninterrupted service" is what is important, then they will buy from established sellers even if they cost a bit more.
The old AT&T government granted monopoly was never really ended. The so-called Baby Bells maintained government granted monopoly status over their respective regions, a monopoly status that is still in place.
One of the most corrupt forms of merchantilism, these monopolies insulate the phone companies from competition and create the environment for them to simply buy each other all over again.
The only thing Judge Green would have needed to do all those years ago was repeal (and prevent the states from reestablishing) monopoly protection of AT&T. Let competition come in where ever the established service provider was not providing decent service, or was charging too much, or anything and everything else that different providers use to compete for your, and my, business.
But no, the regulators wouldn't release even slightly their death-grip on the phone systems, not really, so local monopoly grants continued. Now they're buying each other and the "anti-monopoly" types have the gall to act surprised.
There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly. Even Microsoft must continually innovate (or at least make people think that they innovate) in order to keep their customers. Only government is able to grant monopoly status, as was done with railroads, electric utilities, telephones. If some company is dominant in a field without those legal grants, they can only do so because they serve the customers better than their competition.
I don't mean "provide better service", because even as Windows came to dominate I was already using Linux and understood that Windows was not providing "better service". I mean serving their customers better, by better serving their subjective wants whether an outsider would consider them objectively "better" served or not.
Notwithstanding the GUI, does Linnux have an advantage of Windos xx in computing terms?
That is an excellent question, rarely addressed. Although I count myself as biased toward Linux, at least I will tell someone who wants what Windows provides to use Windows.
Your question belies just a little of the problem involved. "Notwithstanding the GUI". What a Linux based system can do that Windows cannot starts with the GUI. With a Linux system, the GUI is entirely optional. A fully installed Linux server can occupy as little as a hundred megabytes of disk space, and instead of devoting cycles to GUI functions, all those cycles are available to run the applications.
If a GUI is needed, with Windows you get 1 full-blown GUI. Linux distributions package many, ranging from little more than a way to have multiple consoles open at the same time, to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-too GNOME and KDE projects.
Linux is multi-user and networked at its core. Remote administration is no different than being at the console, even with a minimalist system. To do the same in Windows requires substantially more overhead, additional applications, and wide bandwidth (comparatively).
With Windows, you get a choice of two (maybe 3 with Vista, but we don't know yet do we?) file systems, FAT and NTFS. To compare, Linux can utilize FAT and ext2, but then goes on to ext3, jfs, xfs, nfs, afs (I think), and rather a large number of others that I cannot think of off the top of my head. This means that, given criteria for use, a file system can be chosen that expressly meets your needs. Again this means a greater focus on what you are using the machine for, rather than the convenience of Microsoft.
So the same function on Linux will run faster, simply because the entirety of the system can be tailored to meet the needs of that application. Oh and the Linux kernel is smaller and thus faster than the Windows "kernel" too, which means the application will run faster even with no other differences. But that's just the bigot talking. [grin]
My "position" is simple. What is done through coercion is less efficient than what is done by cooperation. Coercion creates zero- and negative-sum outcomes, while cooperation creates positive-sum outcomes.
Community colleges are, in of themselves, wonderful things. I expect that such entities would exist as for-profit or not-for-profit enterprises if such things were not already being funded by tax money. Tax money is an addiction. It is money that does not need to be earned by providing a service, it is earned by pleasing ones political masters who then extract it by force from "everyone else".
Have you ever seen an advertisement for "DeVry's" or "ITT Technical Institute" or "Spokane Technical Institute" or "American School of Art"? These are private, for-profit educational efforts with targetted, focused curriculums in fields where people are interested in learning. If they do not serve their students, they fail.
That is a measure of success that no government agency or program is subject to: failure. So long as they serve their political masters will, they will go on regardless of the damage and destruction they leave in their wake. See: farm subsidies.
"Which prevention, as I explained, with examples, can occur for a variety of reasons, having to do with government interference, geopolitics, geography, physical locations of deposits, technological measures and so on."
So what? Unless prevented, individuals will compete. Dominance in a market by a single player creates an opportunity for profits. Unless prevented by force, that profit will be exploited.
Geography has nothing to do with it, because again there are always alternatives. If the only source of titanium is in South Africa, in a mine owned by DeBiers, then don't use titanium. The development of fiber optics for carrying information has reduced the demand for copper. Oil too expensive? Alternatives are low-grade atomics, ocean thermal difference engines, thermal depolymerization, esterized veggie oil, alcohol, even wood. "Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without." To not buy the monopolists product is always a choice, unless not buying is against the law (such as taxation).
Where people are not restrained by force, a monopoly cannot exist because the erstwhile monopolist can never gain the power to force people to buy their product.
I object to the use of force. It is coercion which reduces efficiency, by preventing people from following a course of action which they deem to be of greatest value to them. It is the lowest manifestation of the inefficiency of central planning, and bad for all the same reasons that Stalin was bad for the Ukraine.
"this only works if there is indeed a competition between the players."
Unless prevented, that is what occurs. The "one entity owns the entire supply of X" argument requires that there is no alternative to "X". I don't know of anything for which there is no alternative.
"Medicare"? By what possible leap of imagination is the provision of medical service improved by being a government monopoly? Everything that is centrally planned is less efficient than a distributed effort, if for no other reason than that the planners have no incentive to maximize service provided, and every incentive to feather their own nests.
Bureaucratic management has only two measures of success: Larger budgets and bigger staffs.
Thank you for the reply, I'm glad that we can so easily move beyond animosity.
"I find it curious that many people vehemently oppose the monopolies of the governmental kind and yet seem to not be bothered by the other ones, even though the likes of Adam Smith saw all of them as a mortal threat to the fairness of the marketplace and the workings of the whole system."
What Adam Smith did not do is consider what actually constitutes a "monopoly". Indeed all the monopolies of his time were government mandated, so it's perfectly natural for him to have made such an error.
The requirement to be a monopoly is to be able to restrict output and thereby charge a higher price. Yet this can only occur where competition is also restricted.
To maintain a free market "monopoly", a seller would have to continuously innovate such that no competitor would be able to undercut their price and/or gain customers by quality. But that is not technically a "monopoly" at all, because the entrenched seller could not restrict output in order to charge more. Doing so would instantly signal to others that there are profits to be made, and attract entrepreneurs like sharks to a bleeding corpse.
For instance, Compaq tried to compete with Dell and Gateway, and couldn't. So in about 1995, they stopped trying and changed their corporate attitude. Rather than compete on price, they leveraged their "monopoly" on the name Compaq and their reputation for quality. They raised their price, selling fewer units but making a much greater profit than they otherwise could.
Yet this in no way impeded others in their persuits, sellers and buyers, they simply found their niche.
As to the "downside" of socialism, the core problem is one of calculation. Any system of central planning cannot be as efficient in the allocation of resources because they have no "profit and loss" measurement to know whether or not they are allocating well. That is why larger companies reorganize into smaller business units, to minimize bureaucratic management and maximize the opportunities to run things in an entrepreneurial manner.
Socialist policies are also based upon coercion, which is why they breed corruption and the worst of evil such as Hitler, Mao, George W. Bush and Pol Pot.
"I read the essential works of Adam Smith and some of Keynes, Heyek and Friedman..."
Then you really owe it to yourself to try something (most anything) by Murray Rothbard. His _For A New Liberty_, http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty.asp is excellent reading.
Adam Smith came up recently on Mises.org, http://www.mises.org/story/2012 which is a reprinting of a chapter from Rothbard's _Perspective on the history of Economic Thought_ which was, sadly, not finished before his death in 1995.
Keynes has one truly fatal flaw to his work: It changes. What I mean is not that his insights evolved, but that his premises depended upon the events and data available at the time. As those premises were demonstrated to be false, because events and data changed, rather than admit he had been wrong he either pretended that he hadn't meant what he said before, or simply ignored data that contradicted him.
He was wrong, for instance that printing paper money and going into debt increases wealth, but being wrong and being systematically inconsistent are two very different things. I can "agree to disagree" with someone who is wrong, but I loath wafflers.
While I certainly would not presume to invent definitions, these are the working definitions of the Austrian school that, in my opinion, best fit the greatest available data:
Capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production. I own what I have, you own what you have, we engage in trade solely because both of us consider what we gain to be greater than what we lose. (I want your apple more than I want my nickel, for example.)
Socialism: Collective ownership of the means of production. What I have, earn, can acquire, all defined by central authority. You and I engage in trade not because we want to, but because that is what the plan says we do.
Fascism: Titular ownership of property by private individuals, but only with the permission of, and under regulation by, a central authority. Driving a car in America is a great example of this.
Please note that merchantilism, "corporate/government alliance", and the other truly nasty causes of the "giant multinational" problem you were highlighting in your earlier postings are aspects not of capitalism at all, but of fascism. Even before coining of the word "fascism" (or "capitalism" for that matter), the British East India Company was a perfect example of a government granted monopoly, the core element of "fascism", a license to do business protected from competition by government fiat.
As I said, I agree with you completely that Gates&Co. are slime, and always have been slime. But if this had been a bastian of real capitalism, they might still have made all their money, but they would have had to do it without being able to rely on government agencies for untold billions in "license fees" stolen from citizens at gunpoint.
"As I already explained, ad nauseum, that in a capitalist society..."
I believe that your position would be greatly enhanced if you did some reading on what capitalism actually is.
I can suggest _How Capitalism Saved America_ by Thomas DiLorenzo, or the daily articles on http://www.mises.org/ and some of the online texts found there.
Your criticisms of Gates&Co. are certainly valid, I agree that scum often float to the top. Those things, however, have nothing what so ever to do with capitalism.
It becomes very clear that your opinion of these people is based upon envy.
Can you support your assertion that the IKEA founder is a crook? Who did he swindle? Who was forced at gun point to buy his product?
A monopoly requires government enforcement. Otherwise, competition is always dogging the heals of the successful. Globe-spanning multinationals certainly are possible in a truly free market, because everything is possible in a truly free market. However, such a company would always have to be more efficient, more effective at producing products that their customers want at a price they wish to pay, or their customers will go elsewhere.
I'm not surprised you equate force with "making it inconvenient to buy a system without Windows", because you envy Gates his fortune. Apple has always been there. White-box makers have always been there. It has always been possible to buy a mainframe, and not even from IBM, and hang dedicated terminals off of it and thereby bypass Microsoft entirely since Microsoft didn't make any software for that environment. My installation of Linux predates Windows95.
Even your own argument against Microsoft reinforces my statement that buyers thought they were getting the most bang for their buck: "their alternate choice was severely penalized."
Your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a great deal of efficiency in the easy transfer of information. Microsoft successfully convinced people that their proprietary formats were the most efficient for this purpose, and indeed it became as self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people that used Microsoft file formats, the more efficient it became to use Microsoft formats.
However, Microsoft created their own undoing. By trying to "have it all", by changing the formats and making their own previous versions incompatible, they released the genie from the bottle. More people are realizing that it is no longer more efficient to use Microsoft products, because other file formats (even Microsoft's old formats) are now more pervasive than the latest and greatest from GatesCo.
Microsoft's marketing is partially factual, the benefit of compatibility and standardization offsets simple perchase price. But those benefits do not offset multiple purchases for the same system. Microsoft's greed for perpetual licensing fees has created the opportunity for competitors to undercut their prices and offer a more attractive product.
As I said, in the absence of coercion, every company must continually innovate or they will lose no matter how big and "powerful" they seem to be. Your protestations about multinational corporations is entirely dependent upon their relationships with governments to insulate them from competition....or did you think tarriffs magically punished big business? No, big businesses love tarriffs because they overwhelmingly punish the small business.
You do say one thing that scares the shit out of me: "proper taxation". By what divine mandate from the Gods do you get to choose how much of your neighbors stuff it is proper for you to steal?
I don't mind disagreeing with you about Gates' good or evil nature, or if a lack of knowing an alternative exists equates to "force". But when you start talking about putting a gun to someone's head because they have stuff you want, that's saying something about yourself that is not flattering.
And who is to be judge of what others "should" do, you?
There is one and only one reason that better programmers than Gates didn't end up in Gates' shoes: They didn't take advantage of the business environment of the time as Gates did. Period.
It is irrelevant how smart someone is, or how competent, or healthy, or any other objective measure, if they do not have the savvy.
I don't begrudge Gates his fortune, because I grasp the economic fact that, in the nearly-free market that software was, he maneuvered, contracted, bought and sold with consumate skill. People who bought his product did so because they believed that they received the best value for their dollar by doing so, even if you disagree with them. Indeed, if their choices were wrong, their competition has an opportunity to step in and make better choices, thereby undercutting their costs. But it will takes someone with better business savvy again to make that determination and profit by it.
The fact that he was nasty doing it means that no one will be able to do it again. That particular bridge to success has been burned behind him.
But he's not even the richest man in the world any more. The guy who owns _IKEA_ has more money. Much of Gates' fortune is locked up on Microsoft stock, and if Microsoft tanks (let's say, because Gates sells lots of stock thus hurting confidence) he's lost a lot of money on paper.
The one single objection I have to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is its political contributions. I object to the fact that they are trying to curry favor with a supposedly "charitable" trust. But then, if the American government were actually a "limited government of enumerated powers", like its charter says, there wouldn't be any influence to buy and the Gates Foundation would take its money elsewhere. So the negative really isn't Gates' entirely in that either.
what do they teach you people in school these days?
It's a government funded school, with government defined curriculum, with standardized testing to government written tests required even for students educated in private or home schools.
Where in there do you see room for "limited government of enumerated powers"? Everything about education in the US is of, by and for GOVERNMENT.
You might find the discussions over on http://www.mises.org/ to be interesting in this regard, since several of the featured writers on that site, including Murray Rothbard and Stephen Kinsella, argue persuasively that IP laws (copywrite, patent) have turned out to be actively destructive to innovation.
One thing to note is that IP laws are relatively recent developments.
So far their Windows client doesn't run under WINE either.
Too bad for them.
Oh, and be careful when setting up the "PayPal" authentication. They set the automatic deduction to $250/month by default, even if you are signing up for the "free" trial. Let's "hope" they never decide to abuse their players.
Abolition. Taxation is merely theft by the biggest mob.
Bob-
(However, use a tax accountant. Not only do they usually save more money than they cost, their fee is tax deductable. It also spreads the liability in case the IRS decides to take you down.)
One reason I'm all for voluntary immigration, those who choose to go to a foreign land tend to be highly motivated. They work hard, learn fast, teach their children well, and increase the overall prosperity of everyone. There are millions of great Americans, for instance, who would say something like, "My parents came here with just the clothes on their back..."
Something like the southern Great Wall between the US and Mexico, on the other hand, traps those who would otherwise work in the US and then go home. This creates the impression of people "bringing Mexico with them" or "trying to take back Texas", when the problem is just that they want to go home.
Slashdot Mirror
Might want to remind the New Jersey legislature that "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
At least with the First Amendment, they can get out of it by saying "It says "CONGRESS" shall make no law, not New Jersey."
Hey, I'm as corruptable as the next guy. To paraphrase Gandalf, "I would assume power with the goal of doing good. But it cannot be used for such."
You're absolutely correct, of course, the Fed.Gov has no power to force the states to do anything. However, since 1794 with the Federal tax on whisky, and that little bru-ha-ha around 1861, not having the power grated to them has had little to no actual effect on their actions.
Bob-
You might find _How Capitalism Saved America_ by Thomas DiLorenzo to be of interest. It's clear that you are thinking much more about things than some of the other nay-sayers here, I would be interested in your reaction to his discussions.
Bob-
Are you honestly telling me multiple companies are all going to lay sewage pipes so that you can choose which one to hook your toilets up to?
l =202
l
No, because I don't know how to do that. I am also not going to tell you that they won't, which is a judgement that you are making out of hand.
What I will tell you is that there are alternatives to sewage lines. Chemical toilets, composting toilets and the like have been around for a very long time.
The provision of such services through taxation creates a situation of monopoly because there is always a legal restriction placed upon the service at the same time. For example, a San Jose, California, professor at SJSU was doing a course on recycling. The entirety of the "garbage" his household generated was about one pint per trash pickup cycle. He was taking that in to the school to demonstrate to his class what was possible, and thus thought he didn't need to pay for the garbage can provided by the city.
No Such Luck! The city prosecuted him for failure to pay for the trash service he wasn't using.
Do I get to not pay school taxes if I do not send a kid to government school? Do I get to not pay sewage taxes if I use a composting toilet? Do I get to not pay for trash pickup if I generate no trash?
Government granted monopolies create inefficiency not only in the usual "waste, fraud and abuse" that government efforts are always rife with, they also prevent innovation by removing money that might have been spent on replacing that government service with something valued higher by the consumer.
Roads? By Cromm, not that old standby. Have you read none of the arguments already published on that matter? Here, have a couple:
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/3_2/3_2_7.pdf
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/7_1/7_1_1.pdf
http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?contro
http://www.mises.org/story/1704
http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds164.htm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory27.html
You can do better than that, can't you? How about prisons? "Justice"? Those, at least, require real thought to refute.
Bob-
Hmmm. and statist utopias are better because.....?
Hahahaha! Well said!
It is the statists who promise Utopia with their planning, their bureaucratic management, their "we can do it right this time, with the right people in charge" claims. Utopia was the creation of Plato, who argued that the best humans could attain would be done through incorruptible and all-powerful philosopher Kings.
People who advocate liberty do not promise Utopia, never have. They just point out that people thrive when allowed to interact voluntarily rather than at gun point. I think what statists fear is that they might have to live with their bad choices, instead of having BigMommyGovernment to coddle them.
You forgot "food".
Oh, oops, that's right. Food is provided by many different providers, suppliers, packagers. Why didn't it make your list of important things? It's only with the establishment of the FDA and other redistribution and regulation agencies that corporate Agriculture has been able to consolidate and create monopolies.
Gee, there we go again! Government intrusion creates the very problems of consolidation and monopoly that get blamed on the "free market", long after the "free" part has been regulated out of existence.
Exactly. Without government monopoly grants, even an established enterprise must constantly be on guard against innovators who promise better service, even if it means a customer would have to pay a premium price.
If price were the only consideration of buyers, there would be only one kind of anything sold. But some people buy IP service to their home for $9.99/month, others $59.99/month, others $299.99/month. Obviously, there is some other consideration that simply price. There is no engineering reason why telephone service cannot be provided in just as great a variety except that the barrier to entry is political, not practical.
Which is why the established players love government monopoly grants, licencing, protectionist tarriffs, and all the other games merchantilists play to not have to actually provide a good service that people want.
I know it's easy to get tricked into the "high entry cost" myth, so please bear with me.
Innovation happens because some shmoe "entrepreneur" smells a profit. If "entry costs" are high, it will require something extra to enter that market. Usually, this is done through innovation rather than trying to beat the established player at their own game.
Wired vs. wireless is a good example of this. Yet still, local governments have extended their monopoly grants to cell phone providers to prevent that very innovation. So is cable TV, which can provide telephone service as easily as it can provide IP, but is almost everywhere itself granted local monopoly status.
I can assure you that the "high cost of entry" myth has been well thrashed since before the time of Adam Smith. After all, without the East India Company, who would risk sending a ship to the other side of the world for something like tea?
If people consider that providing "uninterrupted service" is what is important, then they will buy from established sellers even if they cost a bit more.
That does not require a monopoly grant.
Chalk it up to standard government efficiency.
The old AT&T government granted monopoly was never really ended. The so-called Baby Bells maintained government granted monopoly status over their respective regions, a monopoly status that is still in place.
One of the most corrupt forms of merchantilism, these monopolies insulate the phone companies from competition and create the environment for them to simply buy each other all over again.
The only thing Judge Green would have needed to do all those years ago was repeal (and prevent the states from reestablishing) monopoly protection of AT&T. Let competition come in where ever the established service provider was not providing decent service, or was charging too much, or anything and everything else that different providers use to compete for your, and my, business.
But no, the regulators wouldn't release even slightly their death-grip on the phone systems, not really, so local monopoly grants continued. Now they're buying each other and the "anti-monopoly" types have the gall to act surprised.
There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly. Even Microsoft must continually innovate (or at least make people think that they innovate) in order to keep their customers. Only government is able to grant monopoly status, as was done with railroads, electric utilities, telephones. If some company is dominant in a field without those legal grants, they can only do so because they serve the customers better than their competition.
I don't mean "provide better service", because even as Windows came to dominate I was already using Linux and understood that Windows was not providing "better service". I mean serving their customers better, by better serving their subjective wants whether an outsider would consider them objectively "better" served or not.
Bob-
Notwithstanding the GUI, does Linnux have an advantage of Windos xx in computing terms?
That is an excellent question, rarely addressed. Although I count myself as biased toward Linux, at least I will tell someone who wants what Windows provides to use Windows.
Your question belies just a little of the problem involved. "Notwithstanding the GUI". What a Linux based system can do that Windows cannot starts with the GUI. With a Linux system, the GUI is entirely optional. A fully installed Linux server can occupy as little as a hundred megabytes of disk space, and instead of devoting cycles to GUI functions, all those cycles are available to run the applications.
If a GUI is needed, with Windows you get 1 full-blown GUI. Linux distributions package many, ranging from little more than a way to have multiple consoles open at the same time, to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-too GNOME and KDE projects.
Linux is multi-user and networked at its core. Remote administration is no different than being at the console, even with a minimalist system. To do the same in Windows requires substantially more overhead, additional applications, and wide bandwidth (comparatively).
With Windows, you get a choice of two (maybe 3 with Vista, but we don't know yet do we?) file systems, FAT and NTFS. To compare, Linux can utilize FAT and ext2, but then goes on to ext3, jfs, xfs, nfs, afs (I think), and rather a large number of others that I cannot think of off the top of my head. This means that, given criteria for use, a file system can be chosen that expressly meets your needs. Again this means a greater focus on what you are using the machine for, rather than the convenience of Microsoft.
So the same function on Linux will run faster, simply because the entirety of the system can be tailored to meet the needs of that application. Oh and the Linux kernel is smaller and thus faster than the Windows "kernel" too, which means the application will run faster even with no other differences. But that's just the bigot talking. [grin]
Hi. Sorry I didn't see your message sooner.
My "position" is simple. What is done through coercion is less efficient than what is done by cooperation. Coercion creates zero- and negative-sum outcomes, while cooperation creates positive-sum outcomes.
Community colleges are, in of themselves, wonderful things. I expect that such entities would exist as for-profit or not-for-profit enterprises if such things were not already being funded by tax money. Tax money is an addiction. It is money that does not need to be earned by providing a service, it is earned by pleasing ones political masters who then extract it by force from "everyone else".
Have you ever seen an advertisement for "DeVry's" or "ITT Technical Institute" or "Spokane Technical Institute" or "American School of Art"? These are private, for-profit educational efforts with targetted, focused curriculums in fields where people are interested in learning. If they do not serve their students, they fail.
That is a measure of success that no government agency or program is subject to: failure. So long as they serve their political masters will, they will go on regardless of the damage and destruction they leave in their wake. See: farm subsidies.
Bob-
"Which prevention, as I explained, with examples, can occur for a variety of reasons, having to do with government interference, geopolitics, geography, physical locations of deposits, technological measures and so on."
So what? Unless prevented, individuals will compete. Dominance in a market by a single player creates an opportunity for profits. Unless prevented by force, that profit will be exploited.
Geography has nothing to do with it, because again there are always alternatives. If the only source of titanium is in South Africa, in a mine owned by DeBiers, then don't use titanium. The development of fiber optics for carrying information has reduced the demand for copper. Oil too expensive? Alternatives are low-grade atomics, ocean thermal difference engines, thermal depolymerization, esterized veggie oil, alcohol, even wood. "Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without." To not buy the monopolists product is always a choice, unless not buying is against the law (such as taxation).
Where people are not restrained by force, a monopoly cannot exist because the erstwhile monopolist can never gain the power to force people to buy their product.
I object to the use of force. It is coercion which reduces efficiency, by preventing people from following a course of action which they deem to be of greatest value to them. It is the lowest manifestation of the inefficiency of central planning, and bad for all the same reasons that Stalin was bad for the Ukraine.
Bob-
"this only works if there is indeed a competition between the players."
Unless prevented, that is what occurs. The "one entity owns the entire supply of X" argument requires that there is no alternative to "X". I don't know of anything for which there is no alternative.
"Medicare"? By what possible leap of imagination is the provision of medical service improved by being a government monopoly? Everything that is centrally planned is less efficient than a distributed effort, if for no other reason than that the planners have no incentive to maximize service provided, and every incentive to feather their own nests.
Bureaucratic management has only two measures of success: Larger budgets and bigger staffs.
Thank you for the reply, I'm glad that we can so easily move beyond animosity.
"I find it curious that many people vehemently oppose the monopolies of the governmental kind and yet seem to not be bothered by the other ones, even though the likes of Adam Smith saw all of them as a mortal threat to the fairness of the marketplace and the workings of the whole system."
What Adam Smith did not do is consider what actually constitutes a "monopoly". Indeed all the monopolies of his time were government mandated, so it's perfectly natural for him to have made such an error.
The requirement to be a monopoly is to be able to restrict output and thereby charge a higher price. Yet this can only occur where competition is also restricted.
To maintain a free market "monopoly", a seller would have to continuously innovate such that no competitor would be able to undercut their price and/or gain customers by quality. But that is not technically a "monopoly" at all, because the entrenched seller could not restrict output in order to charge more. Doing so would instantly signal to others that there are profits to be made, and attract entrepreneurs like sharks to a bleeding corpse.
For instance, Compaq tried to compete with Dell and Gateway, and couldn't. So in about 1995, they stopped trying and changed their corporate attitude. Rather than compete on price, they leveraged their "monopoly" on the name Compaq and their reputation for quality. They raised their price, selling fewer units but making a much greater profit than they otherwise could.
Yet this in no way impeded others in their persuits, sellers and buyers, they simply found their niche.
As to the "downside" of socialism, the core problem is one of calculation. Any system of central planning cannot be as efficient in the allocation of resources because they have no "profit and loss" measurement to know whether or not they are allocating well. That is why larger companies reorganize into smaller business units, to minimize bureaucratic management and maximize the opportunities to run things in an entrepreneurial manner.
Socialist policies are also based upon coercion, which is why they breed corruption and the worst of evil such as Hitler, Mao, George W. Bush and Pol Pot.
Bob-
"I read the essential works of Adam Smith and some of Keynes, Heyek and Friedman..."
Then you really owe it to yourself to try something (most anything) by Murray Rothbard. His _For A New Liberty_, http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty.asp is excellent reading.
Adam Smith came up recently on Mises.org, http://www.mises.org/story/2012 which is a reprinting of a chapter from Rothbard's _Perspective on the history of Economic Thought_ which was, sadly, not finished before his death in 1995.
Keynes has one truly fatal flaw to his work: It changes. What I mean is not that his insights evolved, but that his premises depended upon the events and data available at the time. As those premises were demonstrated to be false, because events and data changed, rather than admit he had been wrong he either pretended that he hadn't meant what he said before, or simply ignored data that contradicted him.
He was wrong, for instance that printing paper money and going into debt increases wealth, but being wrong and being systematically inconsistent are two very different things. I can "agree to disagree" with someone who is wrong, but I loath wafflers.
While I certainly would not presume to invent definitions, these are the working definitions of the Austrian school that, in my opinion, best fit the greatest available data:
Capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production. I own what I have, you own what you have, we engage in trade solely because both of us consider what we gain to be greater than what we lose. (I want your apple more than I want my nickel, for example.)
Socialism: Collective ownership of the means of production. What I have, earn, can acquire, all defined by central authority. You and I engage in trade not because we want to, but because that is what the plan says we do.
Fascism: Titular ownership of property by private individuals, but only with the permission of, and under regulation by, a central authority. Driving a car in America is a great example of this.
Please note that merchantilism, "corporate/government alliance", and the other truly nasty causes of the "giant multinational" problem you were highlighting in your earlier postings are aspects not of capitalism at all, but of fascism. Even before coining of the word "fascism" (or "capitalism" for that matter), the British East India Company was a perfect example of a government granted monopoly, the core element of "fascism", a license to do business protected from competition by government fiat.
As I said, I agree with you completely that Gates&Co. are slime, and always have been slime. But if this had been a bastian of real capitalism, they might still have made all their money, but they would have had to do it without being able to rely on government agencies for untold billions in "license fees" stolen from citizens at gunpoint.
"As I already explained, ad nauseum, that in a capitalist society..."
I believe that your position would be greatly enhanced if you did some reading on what capitalism actually is.
I can suggest _How Capitalism Saved America_ by Thomas DiLorenzo, or the daily articles on http://www.mises.org/ and some of the online texts found there.
Your criticisms of Gates&Co. are certainly valid, I agree that scum often float to the top. Those things, however, have nothing what so ever to do with capitalism.
Bob-
It becomes very clear that your opinion of these people is based upon envy.
...or did you think tarriffs magically punished big business? No, big businesses love tarriffs because they overwhelmingly punish the small business.
Can you support your assertion that the IKEA founder is a crook? Who did he swindle? Who was forced at gun point to buy his product?
A monopoly requires government enforcement. Otherwise, competition is always dogging the heals of the successful. Globe-spanning multinationals certainly are possible in a truly free market, because everything is possible in a truly free market. However, such a company would always have to be more efficient, more effective at producing products that their customers want at a price they wish to pay, or their customers will go elsewhere.
I'm not surprised you equate force with "making it inconvenient to buy a system without Windows", because you envy Gates his fortune. Apple has always been there. White-box makers have always been there. It has always been possible to buy a mainframe, and not even from IBM, and hang dedicated terminals off of it and thereby bypass Microsoft entirely since Microsoft didn't make any software for that environment. My installation of Linux predates Windows95.
Even your own argument against Microsoft reinforces my statement that buyers thought they were getting the most bang for their buck: "their alternate choice was severely penalized."
Your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a great deal of efficiency in the easy transfer of information. Microsoft successfully convinced people that their proprietary formats were the most efficient for this purpose, and indeed it became as self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people that used Microsoft file formats, the more efficient it became to use Microsoft formats.
However, Microsoft created their own undoing. By trying to "have it all", by changing the formats and making their own previous versions incompatible, they released the genie from the bottle. More people are realizing that it is no longer more efficient to use Microsoft products, because other file formats (even Microsoft's old formats) are now more pervasive than the latest and greatest from GatesCo.
Microsoft's marketing is partially factual, the benefit of compatibility and standardization offsets simple perchase price. But those benefits do not offset multiple purchases for the same system. Microsoft's greed for perpetual licensing fees has created the opportunity for competitors to undercut their prices and offer a more attractive product.
As I said, in the absence of coercion, every company must continually innovate or they will lose no matter how big and "powerful" they seem to be. Your protestations about multinational corporations is entirely dependent upon their relationships with governments to insulate them from competition.
You do say one thing that scares the shit out of me: "proper taxation". By what divine mandate from the Gods do you get to choose how much of your neighbors stuff it is proper for you to steal?
I don't mind disagreeing with you about Gates' good or evil nature, or if a lack of knowing an alternative exists equates to "force". But when you start talking about putting a gun to someone's head because they have stuff you want, that's saying something about yourself that is not flattering.
Bob-
should...should...should...should...should...
And who is to be judge of what others "should" do, you?
There is one and only one reason that better programmers than Gates didn't end up in Gates' shoes: They didn't take advantage of the business environment of the time as Gates did. Period.
It is irrelevant how smart someone is, or how competent, or healthy, or any other objective measure, if they do not have the savvy.
I don't begrudge Gates his fortune, because I grasp the economic fact that, in the nearly-free market that software was, he maneuvered, contracted, bought and sold with consumate skill. People who bought his product did so because they believed that they received the best value for their dollar by doing so, even if you disagree with them. Indeed, if their choices were wrong, their competition has an opportunity to step in and make better choices, thereby undercutting their costs. But it will takes someone with better business savvy again to make that determination and profit by it.
The fact that he was nasty doing it means that no one will be able to do it again. That particular bridge to success has been burned behind him.
But he's not even the richest man in the world any more. The guy who owns _IKEA_ has more money. Much of Gates' fortune is locked up on Microsoft stock, and if Microsoft tanks (let's say, because Gates sells lots of stock thus hurting confidence) he's lost a lot of money on paper.
The one single objection I have to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is its political contributions. I object to the fact that they are trying to curry favor with a supposedly "charitable" trust. But then, if the American government were actually a "limited government of enumerated powers", like its charter says, there wouldn't be any influence to buy and the Gates Foundation would take its money elsewhere. So the negative really isn't Gates' entirely in that either.
Bob-
what do they teach you people in school these days?
It's a government funded school, with government defined curriculum, with standardized testing to government written tests required even for students educated in private or home schools.
Where in there do you see room for "limited government of enumerated powers"? Everything about education in the US is of, by and for GOVERNMENT.
You might find the discussions over on http://www.mises.org/ to be interesting in this regard, since several of the featured writers on that site, including Murray Rothbard and Stephen Kinsella, argue persuasively that IP laws (copywrite, patent) have turned out to be actively destructive to innovation.
One thing to note is that IP laws are relatively recent developments.
A direct quote from their tech support:
We don't support platforms we don't support.
So far their Windows client doesn't run under WINE either.
Too bad for them.
Oh, and be careful when setting up the "PayPal" authentication. They set the automatic deduction to $250/month by default, even if you are signing up for the "free" trial. Let's "hope" they never decide to abuse their players.
Bob-
Abolition. Taxation is merely theft by the biggest mob.
Bob-
(However, use a tax accountant. Not only do they usually save more money than they cost, their fee is tax deductable. It also spreads the liability in case the IRS decides to take you down.)
One reason I'm all for voluntary immigration, those who choose to go to a foreign land tend to be highly motivated. They work hard, learn fast, teach their children well, and increase the overall prosperity of everyone. There are millions of great Americans, for instance, who would say something like, "My parents came here with just the clothes on their back..."
Something like the southern Great Wall between the US and Mexico, on the other hand, traps those who would otherwise work in the US and then go home. This creates the impression of people "bringing Mexico with them" or "trying to take back Texas", when the problem is just that they want to go home.
Bob-