So change the current ISP model. Analyze your traffic, and design three new subscription plans: - Standard. Is slightly cheaper than you current standard plan, includes enough monthly bandwidth that 60% of your customers can use it with out hitting the limit. Grandma's connection. - Pro. Slightly more expensive than Standard, higher limit, works for the next 30% or whatever of your clients. Basically everyone between grandma and hogs. - Elite. Pays pr. gigabyte, minimum of X gb, with X set so high that it's always more expensive than Pro. Tells the hogs to f*** off or pay up. Offer a lower cost pr. GB at night or whenever you have excess capacity.
Silently accept a certain (high) temporary excess usage for the the standard and pro plans, so the grandkid leaving a bittorrent open on grannys computer doesn't get a huge bill. If traffic is consistently too high, send an e-mail or give them a call, and tell them to slow down, upgrade, or be billed for excess usage.
- Our Exchange implementation was engineered by someone who knew what he was doing, and is now supported by someone who knows what he's doing.
That's exactly the point. If you don't have those people, and most SMEs don't, you're very likely to be wasting money and exposing yourself to an unnecessary risk if you insist on doing your own e-mail.
These guys manage the most actively hostile network on the planet.
Yeah, that's very possibly very impressive, but the photo tour is just boring. They show a stack of a switch, a router and a server, and some other quite un-exotic hardware.
Item one: "Something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog".. What? Since when is that in the category "simple"? If you do web-stuff, you need CSS, if you do Linux kernel programming you need C. It has nothing to do with simple.
Item two: Quirksmode.. and in the end, one site to rule them all. Screw books.
Several kind of encryption have been inspected for years by some of the brightest minds in the field. Are you claiming that they are somehow vulnerable as well?
So, how good is the NSA at cryptography? They're certainly better than the academic world. They have more mathematicians working on the problems, they've been working on them longer, and they have access to everything published in the academic world, while they don't have to make their own results public. But are they a year ahead of the state of the art? Five years? A decade? No one knows.
It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA "tweaks" actually improved the security of DES. This means that back in the '70s, the National Security Agency was two decades ahead of the state of the art.
The article also states that the mentioned tweaks to the DES (NSA basically called up and said, "Your algorithm is wrong. Do this, I'm not saying why, and you can't say I called. Cheers.") pioneered the entire field of cryptanalysis, so the gap may very well have narrowed, but for the sake of being paranoid, I'd rather stick with believing that the US government can read what I write.
Want to be safe? Burn up a stack of DVDs with atmospheric static, and use those as one-time pads. They may be able to break RSA, but they are not above the laws of mathematics.
I don't drive +100 miles daily - I drive 300 miles once every two or three months. But when I'm putting down two or three months salary for a small car, I want that situation to be covered, and so do most other car-buyers.
I think the quote should be more like, "Electric cars are for everybody, just only 90% of the time".
I do believe that plug-in hybrids may very well be part of the solution. They do, however, have a significant shortcoming, in that they need two separate propulsion systems, side by side. This is expensive to construct, and heavy which is bad for mileage/range and security.
Your rant is quite incoherent, and I'm confused as to how it was modded insightful.
I has, however, one common error in it:
Oil is more than halfway to being used up.
This is wrong. We're around half-way on the oil-drilling at mid-1990s prices. Have you noticed what's happened to the oilprices over the past few years? Yeah, me too. This means that the drilling budget just doubled or tripled. There's more than enough oil to go around, at least until someone figures out a practical electrical car (4 hour refueling every 100 miles might cut it for day-to-day usage but it's an awfully convenient, and non-sustainable reason not to visit the in-laws (who live 120 miles upstate)), it just wasn't a good deal to pull it out of the ground ten years ago.
...making itself so obnoxious as to border on rude.
Living in freedom includes other peoples right to be obnoxious, as long as they don't force you to be near them while they are. And NO, voluntarily flying around in airplanes is not being forced to anything.
By the way, you premise is wrong. If the majority had such a big problem with people talking on airplanes, airlines would offer talk-free sections, or even talk-free flights, in order to attract more of the silent fliers.
Outlawing discomfort is a slide to fascism, just hope and pray that you, your job/profession or some vice you have won't become a discomfort to a majority someday.
Want Windows? Cool! Just $10 / month! Word? Excel? Outlook? No prob, just another $10 / month. Project? Access? PowerPoint? No sweat, just pull out another $20 / month each. You want SharePoint? Exchange? Easy, just $5 / month per seat!
Never having to worry about virus, spyware, upgrades - basically, never having to call that rude freelancer support guy that most sub-20 employee non-IT companies rely on? Priceless.
If you're an IT literate, or have one on hand, Linux is a very real alternative, but if you don't and consider IT infrastructure like water and electricity, I know plenty of people who'd be happy to pay a few hundred bucks a year for rented software.
OpenOffice is great, but it's just not there yet. Every second spend trying to figure out why you have no idea what the client is talking about (because his Word annotations aren't showing) or nudging things around because the layout is slightly screwed up, or asking for a PDF or at least a non-docx copy, is a nickel in the "Get Microsoft Office" jar.
Certainly. Now, who is it we usually refer to when a government tries to grab a little too much power, or when a public figure is able to excite a large group about an extreme political position with oratory?
Also, I'd say that it can be argued that the UN and the European community were founded on the principle of avoiding the situation that allowed Hitler to grab power in Germany with significant public support.
Well, here in the UK it has worked almost every time and we now have, more or less, a private monopoly of the buses.
Was there ever more than one company operating buses? Was the original provider "spun off" from the public bus service, rather than sold to the highest bidder? (if yes, it was never a free market)
Can you buy a bus tomorrow and start a scheduled passenger service? Or do you need all sorts of permissions from the city, that will likely be denied?
The transport system is not there to make a profit, it is there to transport people/goods around the country.
Nonsense. People decide to make risky investments because they think their investment will prove valuable to other people, and that those people will pay to receive that value. If I buy a truck to transport fresh tomatoes to your door, and you want my tomatoes, I expect you to pay me. If you think my tomatoes are too expensive, go get your own (or pay someone else less to go get them). Why should a bus service be different?
The transport system is the blood flow of the country (with the communication being the nervous system). They are essential to allow free movement of goods/people/information.
They may very well be essential, but that comparison doesn't make sense. All organs need exactly the same kind of blood, and once the blood vessels and nerves are laid out, they never change. Also, and probably most importantly, they don't have a free will. They only exists to serve you.
Except you get a large bus company running buses for free a few minutes ahead of the usual buses, waiting till the smaller local company goes out of business, then they reduce their service and increase the price to higher than before. Then they do that in every town.
That's because politicians assume that the free market should and will fix everything immediately, and when it doesn't it's clearly because the free market doesn't work and there should be regulation.
Tactics like the ones you describe work - the first time. Maybe the second time. But the more often it happens, the more stubborn people get in their demand for something else. The second firm to try to run the buses might get backing from some private equity and also run the buses for free for a while, or at least be able to ride off the storm. Not taking in any cash for a prolonged is quite harmful to a private firm, and in the meantime the new-comer can focus on communicating what they do better than the incumbent.
The point is, no, the free market doesn't work when you won't let it.
Privatisation of public infrastructure usually doesn't work, and for the same reasons: When government invests billions in something, and then sort-of sells it or spins it off with all sorts of restrictions (and probably a huge loss), it has very little to do with free markets, and to expect all the benefits of a free market to materialize is not realistic.
38 years in jail is way too steep, any jailtime would probably be. But this is no where near "just a mistake". It is not a one-time break-in to prove that security is insufficient. He was deliberately and continously (34 times alledgedly) "altering public records", for his own personal benefit. Even if your security is inadquate it doesn't mean that it's not a crime to break in, and even if it does, fraud is still fraud.
Well, I suppose someone could write an open source DRM module for mplayer. Would that work for you?
Yeah, but no: mplayer -vo mpegpes:grab.mpg YourDRMfile.wmv
So, your DRM decoding module should set a flag in mplayer that forbids file-output. So I modify mpegpes module to ignore that flag, or for mplayer to lie to the DRM module about which output module is loaded. Hmm, so you require the mplayer binary to be signed by someone you trust, probably Microsoft or RedHat, and they'll charge $6000 pr release, even if it's a trivial but critical bugfix. OK, I don't wanna do that, so I plug in a kernel-module that will always open/usr/bin/mplayer_signed instead of/usr/bin/mplayer when the DRM module asks, so it will appear signed. So you now require the kernel to be signed. So I run the kernel in a VM, and screen-scrape from the VM-host -- so you require direct access to a cryptographic chip on the motherboard to make sure that I don't run you video in a VM. Then I get myself one of these videocards with a FPGA on it, and program that to dump the video-stream back into the memory, so I can copy it to disk - so you want your cryptographic chain of trust to include the videocard, and I put my FPGA in the other end of the DVI cable, and rip from there. So you demand access to a chip in the monitor, also. So, no, you can't put a DRM module (that's worth anything, at least) in anything opensource, without making the entire system wall-to-wall closed (AND broken, too). Microsoft, whose customers couldn't care less about closed, tries to do this, and fails. ("What, I can't put my legitimately purchased Plays for Sure! file on my fucking iPod?")
Because that's the alternative you're offering. The quality of anything is assesed by the entity that controls its funding. For public schools that is politicians and bureaucrats, for private schools (or any non-publicly funded school) they are parents.
Exactly. They would be measured like a fortune 500 company. Which is not good.
Fortune 500 exists because subscribers to Fortune Magazine agree that it's a meaningful classification, and one that isn't readily available from other sources (it's simpler than I thought, and I don't know why you couldn't just go to CNN Money and select "order by gross revenue desc" - but that's not the point). I'm not suggesting that private schools are ranked by gross renevue, I'm suggesting that e.g. a magazine figures out a meaningful classification and offers that to their readers.
By saying parents aren't capable of evaluating whether a school is any good, you imply that politicians are somehow able to do that?
Government needs the same simple scales to measure performance as parents do. If schooling was private, there would emerge serveral independent measuring instrument, typically run by magazines or consumer organizations - think fortune 500, but for schools.
The trick is that there would be serveral of these indexes. If you're big on natural science, you'll look at the MIT High School Index, if you're a small-government conservative, you'll at least glance at the Heritage Foundation Economics National School Index, and if you're into to the arts.. well, you get the idea.
The point is, as a parent you need to make these decisions maybe a handful of times, total, per child.
At the very minimum capitialisim must force people to respect the concept of private property before it could be considered useful
Well, theoretically no. Protection of your property will then just be another service that can be freely traded. But most will agree that protecting property is one of a few fields where government makes very good sense. Trouble is when government starts acting like they own all property, and the fact that they'll let you use some of it, is something to be grateful for.
...who fall below your arbitrary 'value' to be considered humane.
The value is about as un-arbitrary as it gets. If no-one want to pay you what you ask, then your work is, by the very definition of value, worth less. The arbitrary value is the one thats negotiated in a sub-committee working group as part of a string of interdependent amendments, or in some election campaign where thousands of voters think voting this guy into office will somehow, magically, make their work worth more. Any raise you manange to force though will immediately be eaten up by inflation.
But I don't disagree with you that there should be a security net for those unable to create enough value to sustain their own living.
The problem is that any sufficiently capitalist system short of anarcho-capitalism turns into what you call mercantilism. What happens is that a corporation, through legitimate means or less so, becomes large enough to influence politics. At that point it rigs the game in its favor, or tries to do so, and from there on you have rent-seeking galore.
I agree, but the problem is not the corporation (at least not when it gets to it's position legitimately), it's that government is confused enough about it's role to allow this to happen. The emergence of the idea of the welfare state over the past century has given politicians a mandate to protect "the weak", but without further definition. That's why the Fed bailed out Bear Sterns, otherwise the market might take the beating it certainly deserves, and a group of people who'd build up some very risky financing of their homes (and YES, YOU are responsible for YOUR mortgage, no matter how convincing the commisions-paid broker sounded) might be foreclosed. So protection of the weak turns into billion-dollar corporate welfare - and it's exactly the comforting knowledge that the Feds would do that, that caused the overly risky constructions to take place. Same for copyright - government wants to protect the "little guy" copyright holder, and effectively shuts down market forces in the copyright area, too.
If copyright bought laws isn't capitalism at its extreme (alright, companies literally being the government would be a bit more extreme, but they like to have mascots so that's unlikely), I don't know what is.
Well, capitalism is the free change of goods. The problem with government and capitalism is that there's nothing inherently free about government - it's an arbitrary structure held in place by the threat of force (if you don't obey the laws, you go to jail = threat of force). Your idea of companies being the government has even less foundation in reality, so you're probabaly right in your last words, no, you don't know what is. Democracy is not a very good mix with capitalism, since voters scare easily. They don't understand the simple mechanism that if you setup a $10/hour minimum wage then work that is worth $5/hour will simply not get done, and anyone who can't provide value above that threshold is left to live on charity -- and yes, hiring some who's worth $5/hour at $10 is nothing but charity. The entertainment business has managed to scare a sufficient number of voters (and politicians) into believing that copyright is some magical thing that must be protected by draconian laws in the face of unautorized copying, where someone who understands the market economy will know to leave it alone and let the market solve it by itself. Yes, it might mean that the next [insert this weeks polished R&B-pop sensation] might go un-limousined and might have to get a real job instead, but is that really a loss? Most of the truly great performing artists get established by themselves without the help of RIAA - they just step in to give them the last kick. The success of iTunes Music Store suggests that if made sufficiently easy to get music legally, then that's what people will do over piracy. Anyway, the beautiful thing about capitalism is that you don't have to be an economist to do it - capitalism is a qualitative description of how people interact and exchange goods, as opposed to most other economic systems, that are descriptions on how people should be forced to interact.
Education is not just a process or service. Teachers have to build trust / relationships with their pupils in order to discover the pupils strengths and weaknesses. Things like that are not necessarily measurable by the bean counters.
Which is why the money needs to follow the pupil 100% - then focus is on the pupil (and the pupils parents) beacuse if they don't think the trust relationship is good enough, they'll move to another school.
When schools are public, then you'll need the metrics, and then it's the beancounters raising our children (screw the trust, we only care if you can read at level n by grade x). If there are no metrics, then schooling is just a black hole you throw money into, hoping something good will come out.
Privatization is about taking control away from bean-counters, and giving it to the people who use the given service.
But hey, I'm open to persuasion, provided the argument made is solid enough.
I've tired to answer some key points, but it's nowhere as elaborate as your post..
[Milton Friedman] seemed to think that private enterprise was a panacea for all of mankind's various ills. He somehow seemed to miss the problem that the underlying profit motive is often at cross-purposes with many of the not-really-business areas he advocated for privatization.
As I understand his theories, they were actually misunderstood by the politicians implementing them as a panacea to all thier ills. The trick is to align the profit motive with the actual task at hand. When private companies are paid to run buses in Copenhagen, they are (as I understand it) required to run certain routes at certain frequencies. They are not required to run a service that customers will want to use. Thus, bus service is plentyful, but sucks, and most people will rather bike 15 km in the rain than set foot in a bus. Similarly, if you subsidise a school according to grades (e.g. you're only paid for >B average students), there's a motivation to neglect the ones that take too much effort to pull above B, or to pressure teachers to over-grade. If you subsidise per student-attendance-day, well, then you create a motive to be a great day-care center.
Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
These are all very high barrier-to-entry industries. A private school can be six kids around a kitchen-table and their parents taking turns as teachers, so while your reservations hold (mostly - most private telecommunications businesses are orders of magnitude more customer-aligned than in their government-past) true for the mentioned businesses, they don't for schools.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools?
Because they can operate the same service at a lower cost, which means money in the pocket. The more money a business pockets (or sinks in inefficient operations), the more likely it is that a more efficient competitor will appear. The idea it to create true competition, and true competition means that a loser will lose something real, and the winner will win something real. In a public pseudo-competition, the fight is only for prestige, in private it's for actual money, and people tend to be a bit more rigorous with their money that with their prestige. ("MY school has a superior athletics program" - "Oh yeah, MY school has a better library" - "Oh look, our salaries are exactly the same" - "How about that, let's play golf")
Schools already compete like this. Neighbourhood housing values are already influenced by the quality of local schools; as land values decline, so too does school funding (in most states).
Way to sustains a negative spiral. In a private system, parents, not conjunctures, decides funding. If you're living in a neighbourhood where the land value declines - if the school is good, you'll keep your kids there, and the school will keep it's funding. If it's struggling, you might even make a donation with the money you saved from property taxes. Now there's a cheap neighbourhood with a good school => more kids => more money.
... I completely fail to see what benefits could be gained by using private companies as opposed to public institutions to run schools. In fact, private companies appear to inject significant risk into the equation, and remove responsibility.
Competition. Real competition. To win, you must continuously improve yourself. Significant innovation and progress is risky, and is generally awarded. Responsibility and accountability comes when irresponsibility means losing your job tomorrow, not in four years, and then only if someone will run against you.
Slashdot Mirror
So change the current ISP model. Analyze your traffic, and design three new subscription plans:
- Standard. Is slightly cheaper than you current standard plan, includes enough monthly bandwidth that 60% of your customers can use it with out hitting the limit. Grandma's connection.
- Pro. Slightly more expensive than Standard, higher limit, works for the next 30% or whatever of your clients. Basically everyone between grandma and hogs.
- Elite. Pays pr. gigabyte, minimum of X gb, with X set so high that it's always more expensive than Pro. Tells the hogs to f*** off or pay up. Offer a lower cost pr. GB at night or whenever you have excess capacity.
Silently accept a certain (high) temporary excess usage for the the standard and pro plans, so the grandkid leaving a bittorrent open on grannys computer doesn't get a huge bill. If traffic is consistently too high, send an e-mail or give them a call, and tell them to slow down, upgrade, or be billed for excess usage.
That's exactly the point. If you don't have those people, and most SMEs don't, you're very likely to be wasting money and exposing yourself to an unnecessary risk if you insist on doing your own e-mail.
Yeah, that's very possibly very impressive, but the photo tour is just boring. They show a stack of a switch, a router and a server, and some other quite un-exotic hardware.
Item one: "Something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog".. What? Since when is that in the category "simple"? If you do web-stuff, you need CSS, if you do Linux kernel programming you need C. It has nothing to do with simple.
Item two: Quirksmode .. and in the end, one site to rule them all. Screw books.
From the Bruce Schneier article, The Legacy of DES:
The article also states that the mentioned tweaks to the DES (NSA basically called up and said, "Your algorithm is wrong. Do this, I'm not saying why, and you can't say I called. Cheers.") pioneered the entire field of cryptanalysis, so the gap may very well have narrowed, but for the sake of being paranoid, I'd rather stick with believing that the US government can read what I write.
Want to be safe? Burn up a stack of DVDs with atmospheric static, and use those as one-time pads. They may be able to break RSA, but they are not above the laws of mathematics.
That would be pointless, since most of the mentioned modules only brings Apache functionality into IIS. ;)
I don't drive +100 miles daily - I drive 300 miles once every two or three months. But when I'm putting down two or three months salary for a small car, I want that situation to be covered, and so do most other car-buyers.
I think the quote should be more like, "Electric cars are for everybody, just only 90% of the time".
I do believe that plug-in hybrids may very well be part of the solution. They do, however, have a significant shortcoming, in that they need two separate propulsion systems, side by side. This is expensive to construct, and heavy which is bad for mileage/range and security.
Your rant is quite incoherent, and I'm confused as to how it was modded insightful.
I has, however, one common error in it:
This is wrong. We're around half-way on the oil-drilling at mid-1990s prices. Have you noticed what's happened to the oilprices over the past few years? Yeah, me too. This means that the drilling budget just doubled or tripled. There's more than enough oil to go around, at least until someone figures out a practical electrical car (4 hour refueling every 100 miles might cut it for day-to-day usage but it's an awfully convenient, and non-sustainable reason not to visit the in-laws (who live 120 miles upstate)), it just wasn't a good deal to pull it out of the ground ten years ago.
Living in freedom includes other peoples right to be obnoxious, as long as they don't force you to be near them while they are. And NO, voluntarily flying around in airplanes is not being forced to anything.
By the way, you premise is wrong. If the majority had such a big problem with people talking on airplanes, airlines would offer talk-free sections, or even talk-free flights, in order to attract more of the silent fliers.
Outlawing discomfort is a slide to fascism, just hope and pray that you, your job/profession or some vice you have won't become a discomfort to a majority someday.
Never having to worry about virus, spyware, upgrades - basically, never having to call that rude freelancer support guy that most sub-20 employee non-IT companies rely on? Priceless.
If you're an IT literate, or have one on hand, Linux is a very real alternative, but if you don't and consider IT infrastructure like water and electricity, I know plenty of people who'd be happy to pay a few hundred bucks a year for rented software.
OpenOffice is great, but it's just not there yet. Every second spend trying to figure out why you have no idea what the client is talking about (because his Word annotations aren't showing) or nudging things around because the layout is slightly screwed up, or asking for a PDF or at least a non-docx copy, is a nickel in the "Get Microsoft Office" jar.
And check out Apache FOP for something up the same alley, but FOSS
Asterisk is to internet telephony as Apache is to web browsing..
As much as I'm a fan of open source, I'm also a very big fan of Just F****ing Works, so I'd include Skype.
Certainly. Now, who is it we usually refer to when a government tries to grab a little too much power, or when a public figure is able to excite a large group about an extreme political position with oratory?
Also, I'd say that it can be argued that the UN and the European community were founded on the principle of avoiding the situation that allowed Hitler to grab power in Germany with significant public support.
Was there ever more than one company operating buses? Was the original provider "spun off" from the public bus service, rather than sold to the highest bidder? (if yes, it was never a free market)
Can you buy a bus tomorrow and start a scheduled passenger service? Or do you need all sorts of permissions from the city, that will likely be denied?
Nonsense. People decide to make risky investments because they think their investment will prove valuable to other people, and that those people will pay to receive that value. If I buy a truck to transport fresh tomatoes to your door, and you want my tomatoes, I expect you to pay me. If you think my tomatoes are too expensive, go get your own (or pay someone else less to go get them). Why should a bus service be different?
They may very well be essential, but that comparison doesn't make sense. All organs need exactly the same kind of blood, and once the blood vessels and nerves are laid out, they never change. Also, and probably most importantly, they don't have a free will. They only exists to serve you.
That's because politicians assume that the free market should and will fix everything immediately, and when it doesn't it's clearly because the free market doesn't work and there should be regulation.
Tactics like the ones you describe work - the first time. Maybe the second time. But the more often it happens, the more stubborn people get in their demand for something else. The second firm to try to run the buses might get backing from some private equity and also run the buses for free for a while, or at least be able to ride off the storm. Not taking in any cash for a prolonged is quite harmful to a private firm, and in the meantime the new-comer can focus on communicating what they do better than the incumbent.
The point is, no, the free market doesn't work when you won't let it.
Privatisation of public infrastructure usually doesn't work, and for the same reasons: When government invests billions in something, and then sort-of sells it or spins it off with all sorts of restrictions (and probably a huge loss), it has very little to do with free markets, and to expect all the benefits of a free market to materialize is not realistic.
38 years in jail is way too steep, any jailtime would probably be.
But this is no where near "just a mistake". It is not a one-time break-in to prove that security is insufficient. He was deliberately and continously (34 times alledgedly) "altering public records", for his own personal benefit.
Even if your security is inadquate it doesn't mean that it's not a crime to break in, and even if it does, fraud is still fraud.
Yeah, but no:
mplayer -vo mpegpes:grab.mpg YourDRMfile.wmv
So, your DRM decoding module should set a flag in mplayer that forbids file-output. So I modify mpegpes module to ignore that flag, or for mplayer to lie to the DRM module about which output module is loaded. Hmm, so you require the mplayer binary to be signed by someone you trust, probably Microsoft or RedHat, and they'll charge $6000 pr release, even if it's a trivial but critical bugfix.
OK, I don't wanna do that, so I plug in a kernel-module that will always open
Then I get myself one of these videocards with a FPGA on it, and program that to dump the video-stream back into the memory, so I can copy it to disk - so you want your cryptographic chain of trust to include the videocard, and I put my FPGA in the other end of the DVI cable, and rip from there. So you demand access to a chip in the monitor, also.
So, no, you can't put a DRM module (that's worth anything, at least) in anything opensource, without making the entire system wall-to-wall closed (AND broken, too). Microsoft, whose customers couldn't care less about closed, tries to do this, and fails. ("What, I can't put my legitimately purchased Plays for Sure! file on my fucking iPod?")
I would be equally "fun" to replace non-color-blind peoples front door locks.
Because that's the alternative you're offering. The quality of anything is assesed by the entity that controls its funding. For public schools that is politicians and bureaucrats, for private schools (or any non-publicly funded school) they are parents.
Fortune 500 exists because subscribers to Fortune Magazine agree that it's a meaningful classification, and one that isn't readily available from other sources (it's simpler than I thought, and I don't know why you couldn't just go to CNN Money and select "order by gross revenue desc" - but that's not the point). I'm not suggesting that private schools are ranked by gross renevue, I'm suggesting that e.g. a magazine figures out a meaningful classification and offers that to their readers.
BS.
.. well, you get the idea.
By saying parents aren't capable of evaluating whether a school is any good, you imply that politicians are somehow able to do that?
Government needs the same simple scales to measure performance as parents do. If schooling was private, there would emerge serveral independent measuring instrument, typically run by magazines or consumer organizations - think fortune 500, but for schools.
The trick is that there would be serveral of these indexes. If you're big on natural science, you'll look at the MIT High School Index, if you're a small-government conservative, you'll at least glance at the Heritage Foundation Economics National School Index, and if you're into to the arts
The point is, as a parent you need to make these decisions maybe a handful of times, total, per child.
Well, theoretically no. Protection of your property will then just be another service that can be freely traded. But most will agree that protecting property is one of a few fields where government makes very good sense. Trouble is when government starts acting like they own all property, and the fact that they'll let you use some of it, is something to be grateful for.
The value is about as un-arbitrary as it gets. If no-one want to pay you what you ask, then your work is, by the very definition of value, worth less. The arbitrary value is the one thats negotiated in a sub-committee working group as part of a string of interdependent amendments, or in some election campaign where thousands of voters think voting this guy into office will somehow, magically, make their work worth more. Any raise you manange to force though will immediately be eaten up by inflation.
But I don't disagree with you that there should be a security net for those unable to create enough value to sustain their own living.
The emergence of the idea of the welfare state over the past century has given politicians a mandate to protect "the weak", but without further definition.
That's why the Fed bailed out Bear Sterns, otherwise the market might take the beating it certainly deserves, and a group of people who'd build up some very risky financing of their homes (and YES, YOU are responsible for YOUR mortgage, no matter how convincing the commisions-paid broker sounded) might be foreclosed. So protection of the weak turns into billion-dollar corporate welfare - and it's exactly the comforting knowledge that the Feds would do that, that caused the overly risky constructions to take place.
Same for copyright - government wants to protect the "little guy" copyright holder, and effectively shuts down market forces in the copyright area, too.
Well, capitalism is the free change of goods. The problem with government and capitalism is that there's nothing inherently free about government - it's an arbitrary structure held in place by the threat of force (if you don't obey the laws, you go to jail = threat of force).
Your idea of companies being the government has even less foundation in reality, so you're probabaly right in your last words, no, you don't know what is.
Democracy is not a very good mix with capitalism, since voters scare easily. They don't understand the simple mechanism that if you setup a $10/hour minimum wage then work that is worth $5/hour will simply not get done, and anyone who can't provide value above that threshold is left to live on charity -- and yes, hiring some who's worth $5/hour at $10 is nothing but charity.
The entertainment business has managed to scare a sufficient number of voters (and politicians) into believing that copyright is some magical thing that must be protected by draconian laws in the face of unautorized copying, where someone who understands the market economy will know to leave it alone and let the market solve it by itself. Yes, it might mean that the next [insert this weeks polished R&B-pop sensation] might go un-limousined and might have to get a real job instead, but is that really a loss? Most of the truly great performing artists get established by themselves without the help of RIAA - they just step in to give them the last kick. The success of iTunes Music Store suggests that if made sufficiently easy to get music legally, then that's what people will do over piracy.
Anyway, the beautiful thing about capitalism is that you don't have to be an economist to do it - capitalism is a qualitative description of how people interact and exchange goods, as opposed to most other economic systems, that are descriptions on how people should be forced to interact.
Which is why the money needs to follow the pupil 100% - then focus is on the pupil (and the pupils parents) beacuse if they don't think the trust relationship is good enough, they'll move to another school.
When schools are public, then you'll need the metrics, and then it's the beancounters raising our children (screw the trust, we only care if you can read at level n by grade x). If there are no metrics, then schooling is just a black hole you throw money into, hoping something good will come out.
Privatization is about taking control away from bean-counters, and giving it to the people who use the given service.
I've tired to answer some key points, but it's nowhere as elaborate as your post..
As I understand his theories, they were actually misunderstood by the politicians implementing them as a panacea to all thier ills.
The trick is to align the profit motive with the actual task at hand. When private companies are paid to run buses in Copenhagen, they are (as I understand it) required to run certain routes at certain frequencies. They are not required to run a service that customers will want to use. Thus, bus service is plentyful, but sucks, and most people will rather bike 15 km in the rain than set foot in a bus.
Similarly, if you subsidise a school according to grades (e.g. you're only paid for >B average students), there's a motivation to neglect the ones that take too much effort to pull above B, or to pressure teachers to over-grade. If you subsidise per student-attendance-day, well, then you create a motive to be a great day-care center.
These are all very high barrier-to-entry industries. A private school can be six kids around a kitchen-table and their parents taking turns as teachers, so while your reservations hold (mostly - most private telecommunications businesses are orders of magnitude more customer-aligned than in their government-past) true for the mentioned businesses, they don't for schools.
Because they can operate the same service at a lower cost, which means money in the pocket.
The more money a business pockets (or sinks in inefficient operations), the more likely it is that a more efficient competitor will appear.
The idea it to create true competition, and true competition means that a loser will lose something real, and the winner will win something real. In a public pseudo-competition, the fight is only for prestige, in private it's for actual money, and people tend to be a bit more rigorous with their money that with their prestige.
("MY school has a superior athletics program" - "Oh yeah, MY school has a better library" - "Oh look, our salaries are exactly the same" - "How about that, let's play golf")
Way to sustains a negative spiral. In a private system, parents, not conjunctures, decides funding.
If you're living in a neighbourhood where the land value declines - if the school is good, you'll keep your kids there, and the school will keep it's funding. If it's struggling, you might even make a donation with the money you saved from property taxes. Now there's a cheap neighbourhood with a good school => more kids => more money.
Competition. Real competition. To win, you must continuously improve yourself. Significant innovation and progress is risky, and is generally awarded.
Responsibility and accountability comes when irresponsibility means losing your job tomorrow, not in four years, and then only if someone will run against you.