This would have a significant negative impact on GPL'd software.
Copyright (especially for an unlimited duration) is no more justifiable for GPL'd software than for any other "content" (for lack of a bette word...). Becoming public-domain ASAP is a good thing, even where the GPL is concerned. Where it would have a negative impact is in regards to the political agendas of some members of the GPL community -- which isn't much of a loss.
I'm well aware of the effects of "nice" on timeslices. However, it does appear have some effect on interactivity during I/O. In my experience, running a full backup (HDD to HDD compress and copy via "afio -Z") without "nice" (or even with "nice -n10") will ruin interactive response on my hardware, but with "nice -n19" I barely notice it's running. Anecdotal, perhaps, but true nonetheless.
I believe some of the I/O schedulers do include a process's priority into the disk I/O schedule. That might explain why it works; CFQ, of course, uses a separate I/O priority setting, a definite improvement. Another possibility, perhaps in addition to the first, is that I/O access is stalling for lack of CPU time to process the requests, and running the CPU-intensive parts at low priorities allows for requests to be processed in a more timely fashion.
Anyway, I can do all of the things you mentioned simultaneously without any serious interactivity problems, but that's probably just because I have some fairly decent hardware. I doubt it would work so well on one of my older systems.
Really? I usually find that adding "nice -n19" to a disk-intensive process (video encoding, backups, etc.) greatly improves responsiveness elsewhere. Maybe that's just me, though.
Pointer arithmetic and forging is impossible, so objects cannot override each others' memory. This kind of bug creates cryptic problems that are pretty hard to debug, as they are not easily contained in a single component.
This is true of many garbage-collected languages (e.g. Java), but it is not a property of garbage collection per se. For example, there are garbage-collection libraries for C, but they do not prevent you from doing pointer arithmetic or creating pointers to any addresses you wish. The difference is that C has a native pointer type and pointer dereferencing, whereas Java does not -- a language design issue unrelated to garbage collection. It makes Java safer, but less suitable for the sort of precise low-level programming C excels at. A language with only object references and no pointers could be designed to require manual memory management rather than performing GC; it's just very uncommon.
You're relying on the assumption that no one else on earth exists with similar ideals, which is a fallacy.
No, I'm only relying on the fact that there are a substancial portion that do not share your ideals.
In any event, communal systems do not work beyond a very small community size because in practice (if not in theory) they depend on unanimous consent for all actions, which any community of significant size will never have.
If its branches function along truly democratic processes that do represent the will of the people, how can it help but result in a freer society, at least by that society's definition of "free"?
Simple: people generally want freedom for themselves, but want to control others. When people get together in a democracy they promote and pass laws which attempt to make others act more like themselves. Individually they don't see that as a loss of freedom because they already wanted to act in accordance with the new laws, but the freedoms of others are constrained.
Perhaps you could call that "that society's definition of 'free'", but I say that freedom to do only what the majority of others want you to do isn't freedom at all. How free a society is has more to do with how it treats its minorities than how it treats its majorities.
Something is wrong with any society that thinks a mere majority vote can justify anything. "Numbers make right" isn't any better than "might makes right" -- in fact, there's not much difference between the two.
I'm not certain but I once heard someone say that languages like Lisp are used in nuclear facilities because they are quick, stable and can be analyzed mathematically to be proved 'correct.' The garbage collector causes Java to be none of these. Also, I think that since Lisp is interpreted, you can switch a program with another modified program without losing execution or control. Not too sure on the details of that though.
Lisp also makes extensive use of garbage collection, although there are real-time garbage collection algorithms for it.
Most variants of Lisp are compiled, not interpreted.
Despite being compiled, you can indeed update a Lisp program on-the-fly. This is accomplished through partial recompilation and dynamic linking.
What is your alternative choice for deciding who gets the spectrum?
I'm not the GP, but I'll attempt an answer anyway.
One solution would be to allocate spectrum in the same way as land is already allocated; namely, homesteading and contractual transfer (i.e. private ownership). Anyone can transmit whatever they want, provided it doesn't interfere with the reception of an existing signal (or cause other side effects, e.g. cancer). Interference at a historical reception point is treated as a trespass against both the owner of the transmitter and the owner of the receiver; any disputes over ownership fall under the jurisdiction of the civil court system.
How do you explain the existence of contract lawyers? You know; people highly trained and well paid to spend their days understanding how to read and write small print. . ..
Some people who sign contracts are not the same as you; they might be, say for example, overwrought working parents who may not have the same time and ability to focus their attention that you enjoy. . ..
Which is to say, some people spend their time developing skills other than the understanding of legal fine print and technology. Thank goodness!
If you doesn't understand a contract you shouldn't sign it. Simple as that. If you want the service, and don't care to become a contract lawyer, then hire a specialist in that field to explain it to you, so that you can enter the contract with a full understanding of the entirely voluntary responsibilities you are accepting.
If you want contracts to become simpler you have to refuse to sign ones you don't understand. Otherwise they'll just present you with the most complex and one-sided contract they think they'll be able to get away with -- which will always be more than you intended to agree to. It's no different than overpaying at the store because you refused to shop around, or buying a good at a price that exceeds its value to you. If the terms are too onerous, walk away.
Do you have any insurance at all? Car, health, life, property? If so, you are footing the bill for someone else, or someone else is footing the bill for you. . . . You can argue that you will pay those things back, but you may get into a situation where you can't (lose your job, have unplanned expenses, etc), and so someone is going to have to cover you.
The differences are that all those things are voluntary, and they all separate different estimated average future costs into different risk categories (insurance premiums, interest rates). They set a price floor based on their costs, including estimated risk, and I set a price ceiling based on what the risk mitigation is worth to me; from there we negotiate a mutually beneficial transaction, or go our separate ways.
Socialized health care (and mandantory insurance, et al.) are not voluntary. We don't have the option of going our separate ways. The government sets the price, and everyone has to pay it, whether or not they expect their benefit to outweight the cost. The point of the system is not mitigation of unknown, future risk, but rather an institutionalized transfer of wealth from those who do not desire expensive health care services to those who do. Supporting such a system is rather like justifying extortion on the basis that most of the proceeds will be donated to charity. If you want to help a charity, donate your own money!
When was the last time you voted a CEO out of his job because the company provided poor service? That power is usually reserved for the shareholder class, who are frequently not even the company's customers or are ever affected by poor customer service.
The CEO serves the shareholders, not the customers. The company as a whole serves the customers, and you vote the company out of its job by refusing to buy its product.
"Not buying their product" doesn't count. We're talking about monopolies (health care).
Health care is a valuable (and resource-intensive) service, but not a monopoly; a few non-exclusive regulations aside, anyone can provide health care. Seeking health care is a free choice in nearly all cases, even when the injury or disease is life-threatening. The fact that most people value their own health care over other people's property is not surprising, but that fact does nothing to differentiate forced health-care subsidies (whether through taxes or mandantory insurance) from simple theft.
I don't care, in fact I'm happy knowing that people in my country get medical care when they really need it, yes our system could be better and the care could be more extensive but it is there when you really need it. . ..
It doesn't matter whether you, or any number of other individuals, don't mind paying into the system. You could keep doing that whether or not it was mandantory. The problem is that you want to force others to pay into the system with you, against their will, which is something you have no right to do, individually or collectively.
That is impossible. Any introductory textbook on electrodynamics will tell you that magnetic fields can do no work. There is a simple loophole -- a magnetic field can induce an electric field, which does work.
Technically, static magnetic fields can do no work. A changing field can do work, but then you're losing energy somewhere else to make up for it. Electrical potential, for example, if the field is due to an electric current, or the potential energy in a "permanent" magnet as it degausses over time. As for your "loophole", the energy isn't coming from the (static) magnetic field, but rather from the motion of the charged particles within the field; the field is essentially a catalyst for changing mechanical energy into electrical potential energy.
See, you contradicted yourself. When you copy something, you take away the scarcity of the product. If I have 10 copies of my movie, I can sell it for $10 a pop. If you make a 10 copies, now the market has twice as many, making my product less scarce, hence you took away from the value of the movie.
Congratulations, you've just described the consequences of competition. There's nothing immoral about reducing scarcity -- rather the opposite, in fact.
Wouldn't you get [annoyed] if you paid $50k for a BMW just for me to copy it, for free mind you? It'd make it worth... a lot less.
I might be annoyed, if I purchased it primarily as a status symbol. That still doesn't mean you did anything wrong. After all, I'd be just as annoyed if it stopped being a status symbol for any other reason -- for example, if BMW were found to have employed socially unacceptable practices in constructing their cars (e.g. slave labor, massive environmental damage, etc.). The only one at fault would be myself, for mispredicting the future value I would get out of owning it.
The point of property right -- and the law in general -- is to peaceably resolve the inevitable disputes that arise over the control of naturally and inescapably scarce resources. To employ the law as a way to create artificial scarcity is an massive injustice, not to mention ultimately futile.
Since economic power and political power are fundamentally equivalent, . ..
Completely false. Economic "power" is merely the ability to offer a voluntary incentive; personal rights and property are respected by definition. If you refuse the only consequence is that you don't get whatever was offered in exchange -- which was never yours to begin with.
Political power, on the other hand, is the ability to threaten with and carry out physical violence -- murder, detainment, theft -- to coerce you into acting in accordance with the other's designs. Personal rights and property are not respected, and if you refuse you risk both personal injury and loss of property.
Economic power can sometimes become a gateway to the attainment of political power, but by no means are the two equivalent.
Real free market capitalists (i.e., not the ones that think free market=whatever's best for my business, which is more of a mercantilist outlook) accept that trust-busting is necessary in some occasions.
I can agree with that, provided the qualification is added that market failures (including "malevolent" monopolies) only occur as a result of prior aggression, typically in the form of State intervention in the market. I have nothing against the State eliminating monopolies it created through its own actions. Rather, I would prefer the State eliminate all its monopolies, preferably concluding with itself, the greatest monopoly of them all.
A monopoly is a place where the market has demonstrably failed (for whatever reason), so there's nothing wrong with trying to force corrections.
Here there are a couple of issues. First, not all monopolies are bad. Sometimes there's really only room for a single producer; forcibly creating extra competitors would raise prices and decrease efficiency. Even in cases where there could be competition, the monopoly may simply be more efficient. Once again crippling the monopoly to create competition would result in a less efficient market.
In fact, the only case where one has cause to worry about a monopoly is that in which the monopoly was obtained or maintained by an act (or acts) of aggression against real or potential competitors. Since such acts are already illegal when committed by any individual or organization except the State, the only monopolies one has cause to worry about are those created or assisted by the State.
The second issue, which builds on the first, is simply this: Why would the State bother to cripple a monopoly that it created in the first place? Obviously, it would do no such thing, unless perhaps it had the occasional need to keep its pet monopolies on a leash; consequently, any antitrust laws it may enforce must primarly be employed in crippling non-aggressive monopolies in efficient markets, wasting resources and raising prices.
I have to say that this is exactly what FDR had to do during the depression. People were starving and he had guys going out and slaughtering pigs and leaving them to rot... Otherwise the price would never rise; I couldn't imagine having to try to explain that, let alone make the executive decision to have it done.
I wouldn't try to use that argument in support of copyright laws if I were you. The reason why such actions would be difficult to justify is that they were the wrong actions. The Depression was the inevitable consequence of prices that were too high, a result of monetary expansion and easy credit during the period leading up to 1929. The change in policy from laisse-faire to active intervention, price controls, and the sort of willful waste of resources you brought up are the primary reason the Great Depression lasted for so long when all the prior depressions corrected themselves, typically in under a year. Depressions are symptoms of malinvestment; FDR forcibly maintained the malinvestments, causing the symptoms to drag on long after they would have otherwise brought about their own cure. The end of the Depression was brought about mostly by the start of WWII, not by FDR's policies.
You can find a far more detailed analysis of the economics of the Depression here: America's Great Depression.
released under the open-source MIT license (which I assume is the reason they can't bundle it with Windows)
I'm not a lawyer, of course, but I don't think the MIT license would prevent them from redistributing anything. It only includes the standard "no warranty" clause and a requirement to include the license and copyright notice when distributing the software. The BSD license has more restrictions than that, and there's plenty of BSD code in a standard Windows distribution.
Bring on the heartless, self-absorbed, unfeeling they-still-make-more-money-than-some-other-parts- of-the-world-and-they-choose-to-do-this-so-why- should-we-feel-sorry-for-them posts.
As opposed to the heartless, self-absorbed, unfeeling they-don't-make-as-much-as-we-think-they-should- and-thus-shouldn't-be-allowed-to-accept-such-jobs- even-though-their-alternatives-are-all-worse posts?
The solution to "exploitation" is simple: offer them something better. Complaining about the organizations offering them the best jobs available to them in their situation is perhaps the single worse way imaginable to go about improving said situation. Great way to hold them back, though.
Are you going to build the road in front of your house? Or do you just want to pay for the roads you use? What do you want? No roads?
I don't expect road travel to go away anytime soon, and obviously road-building and maintenance have to be paid for. Logically, those who use a given road ought to pay the owner for their use of it (unless the owner wants to run a charity). Local roads would probably be best handled through a co-op of some kind, like most other utilities; longer routes -- inter-city roads, interstates -- would most likely charge tolls. Other arrangements are certainly possible. The only condition imposed is that everyone must have equal rights -- meaning that no one can be forced to pay for someone else's use of the roads, since such a system can only be maintained by allowing some people more rights than others.
If you can't accept some decisions not entirely along your line of thinking... go live on an island. Between any number of people >1 , there will ALWAYS be differences of opinion.
I'm perfectly happy to accept others' decisions, so long as their decisions concern those things which are rightly theirs to control: their own actions and their own property. What we are discussing, however, is the practice of placing the will of the majority over the liberty and fundamental rights of the minority. In other words, democracy.
The ones that ought to be living on an island are those who refuse to respect the liberty of others. They are the ones who cannot tolerate differences of opinion.
And income tax doesn't do the same thing, just in the opposite way?
I didn't mean that at all. I agree that income taxes also distort the market -- in fact, any tax whatsoever will distort the market somehow. The point of a tax is to reallocate production, both by inhibiting the item taxed and encouraging the good the tax money is spent on; a tax which didn't distort the market would be meaningless.
On a high level income taxes have an effect more or less opposite that of sales taxes, although the details are generally different enough that they can't truly be said to cancel each other out. The overall, national balance may be restored (although there's no way to determine whether that has been occured while the distortions persist), but on an individual basis some will be coerced into saving more than they otherwise would, and others will be pressured to consume.
Still, what I meant is that the.gov aren't holding a gun and telling you to save money - the violence end is when you buy something and they want their share. If you don't buy anything they don't come to get you.
True enough. You could say that people are indeed "choosing" to save -- but when it comes to economic analysis, that choice is influenced by the taxation, and thus by a threat of force, which means that the amount they are choosing to save is not equivalent to the optimal level of saving which would exist in the absence of coercion. Ergo, the tax results in a suboptimal balance between saving and consumption.
now now, that's a bit of a cynical view of the world isn't it? What I meant was: if your representation is not good, your democracy is broken. maybe a revolution will help ?
There's nothing "cynical" about it; those were merely the facts of the case.
Representation isn't the issue. The simple fact is that it doesn't matter whether a given policy has even 80 or 90% support among the entire populace: not one person in that 80 or 90% has the rightful authority to impose their preferences on the 10 or 20% that disagree; consequently, the group as a whole cannot have such a right either, since the rights of a group are merely the aggregate rights of its individual members.
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Copyright (especially for an unlimited duration) is no more justifiable for GPL'd software than for any other "content" (for lack of a bette word...). Becoming public-domain ASAP is a good thing, even where the GPL is concerned. Where it would have a negative impact is in regards to the political agendas of some members of the GPL community -- which isn't much of a loss.
I'm well aware of the effects of "nice" on timeslices. However, it does appear have some effect on interactivity during I/O. In my experience, running a full backup (HDD to HDD compress and copy via "afio -Z") without "nice" (or even with "nice -n10") will ruin interactive response on my hardware, but with "nice -n19" I barely notice it's running. Anecdotal, perhaps, but true nonetheless.
I believe some of the I/O schedulers do include a process's priority into the disk I/O schedule. That might explain why it works; CFQ, of course, uses a separate I/O priority setting, a definite improvement. Another possibility, perhaps in addition to the first, is that I/O access is stalling for lack of CPU time to process the requests, and running the CPU-intensive parts at low priorities allows for requests to be processed in a more timely fashion.
Anyway, I can do all of the things you mentioned simultaneously without any serious interactivity problems, but that's probably just because I have some fairly decent hardware. I doubt it would work so well on one of my older systems.
Really? I usually find that adding "nice -n19" to a disk-intensive process (video encoding, backups, etc.) greatly improves responsiveness elsewhere. Maybe that's just me, though.
This is true of many garbage-collected languages (e.g. Java), but it is not a property of garbage collection per se. For example, there are garbage-collection libraries for C, but they do not prevent you from doing pointer arithmetic or creating pointers to any addresses you wish. The difference is that C has a native pointer type and pointer dereferencing, whereas Java does not -- a language design issue unrelated to garbage collection. It makes Java safer, but less suitable for the sort of precise low-level programming C excels at. A language with only object references and no pointers could be designed to require manual memory management rather than performing GC; it's just very uncommon.
No, I'm only relying on the fact that there are a substancial portion that do not share your ideals.
In any event, communal systems do not work beyond a very small community size because in practice (if not in theory) they depend on unanimous consent for all actions, which any community of significant size will never have.
Simple: people generally want freedom for themselves, but want to control others. When people get together in a democracy they promote and pass laws which attempt to make others act more like themselves. Individually they don't see that as a loss of freedom because they already wanted to act in accordance with the new laws, but the freedoms of others are constrained.
Perhaps you could call that "that society's definition of 'free'", but I say that freedom to do only what the majority of others want you to do isn't freedom at all. How free a society is has more to do with how it treats its minorities than how it treats its majorities.
Something is wrong with any society that thinks a mere majority vote can justify anything. "Numbers make right" isn't any better than "might makes right" -- in fact, there's not much difference between the two.
That's the first kind, with you as the dictator trying to reshape society according to your ideals.
I'm not the GP, but I'll attempt an answer anyway.
One solution would be to allocate spectrum in the same way as land is already allocated; namely, homesteading and contractual transfer (i.e. private ownership). Anyone can transmit whatever they want, provided it doesn't interfere with the reception of an existing signal (or cause other side effects, e.g. cancer). Interference at a historical reception point is treated as a trespass against both the owner of the transmitter and the owner of the receiver; any disputes over ownership fall under the jurisdiction of the civil court system.
If you doesn't understand a contract you shouldn't sign it. Simple as that. If you want the service, and don't care to become a contract lawyer, then hire a specialist in that field to explain it to you, so that you can enter the contract with a full understanding of the entirely voluntary responsibilities you are accepting.
If you want contracts to become simpler you have to refuse to sign ones you don't understand. Otherwise they'll just present you with the most complex and one-sided contract they think they'll be able to get away with -- which will always be more than you intended to agree to. It's no different than overpaying at the store because you refused to shop around, or buying a good at a price that exceeds its value to you. If the terms are too onerous, walk away.
The differences are that all those things are voluntary, and they all separate different estimated average future costs into different risk categories (insurance premiums, interest rates). They set a price floor based on their costs, including estimated risk, and I set a price ceiling based on what the risk mitigation is worth to me; from there we negotiate a mutually beneficial transaction, or go our separate ways.
Socialized health care (and mandantory insurance, et al.) are not voluntary. We don't have the option of going our separate ways. The government sets the price, and everyone has to pay it, whether or not they expect their benefit to outweight the cost. The point of the system is not mitigation of unknown, future risk, but rather an institutionalized transfer of wealth from those who do not desire expensive health care services to those who do. Supporting such a system is rather like justifying extortion on the basis that most of the proceeds will be donated to charity. If you want to help a charity, donate your own money!
The CEO serves the shareholders, not the customers. The company as a whole serves the customers, and you vote the company out of its job by refusing to buy its product.
Health care is a valuable (and resource-intensive) service, but not a monopoly; a few non-exclusive regulations aside, anyone can provide health care. Seeking health care is a free choice in nearly all cases, even when the injury or disease is life-threatening. The fact that most people value their own health care over other people's property is not surprising, but that fact does nothing to differentiate forced health-care subsidies (whether through taxes or mandantory insurance) from simple theft.
It doesn't matter whether you, or any number of other individuals, don't mind paying into the system. You could keep doing that whether or not it was mandantory. The problem is that you want to force others to pay into the system with you, against their will, which is something you have no right to do, individually or collectively.
Technically, static magnetic fields can do no work. A changing field can do work, but then you're losing energy somewhere else to make up for it. Electrical potential, for example, if the field is due to an electric current, or the potential energy in a "permanent" magnet as it degausses over time. As for your "loophole", the energy isn't coming from the (static) magnetic field, but rather from the motion of the charged particles within the field; the field is essentially a catalyst for changing mechanical energy into electrical potential energy.
Congratulations, you've just described the consequences of competition. There's nothing immoral about reducing scarcity -- rather the opposite, in fact.
I might be annoyed, if I purchased it primarily as a status symbol. That still doesn't mean you did anything wrong. After all, I'd be just as annoyed if it stopped being a status symbol for any other reason -- for example, if BMW were found to have employed socially unacceptable practices in constructing their cars (e.g. slave labor, massive environmental damage, etc.). The only one at fault would be myself, for mispredicting the future value I would get out of owning it.
The point of property right -- and the law in general -- is to peaceably resolve the inevitable disputes that arise over the control of naturally and inescapably scarce resources. To employ the law as a way to create artificial scarcity is an massive injustice, not to mention ultimately futile.
Completely false. Economic "power" is merely the ability to offer a voluntary incentive; personal rights and property are respected by definition. If you refuse the only consequence is that you don't get whatever was offered in exchange -- which was never yours to begin with.
Political power, on the other hand, is the ability to threaten with and carry out physical violence -- murder, detainment, theft -- to coerce you into acting in accordance with the other's designs. Personal rights and property are not respected, and if you refuse you risk both personal injury and loss of property.
Economic power can sometimes become a gateway to the attainment of political power, but by no means are the two equivalent.
I can agree with that, provided the qualification is added that market failures (including "malevolent" monopolies) only occur as a result of prior aggression, typically in the form of State intervention in the market. I have nothing against the State eliminating monopolies it created through its own actions. Rather, I would prefer the State eliminate all its monopolies, preferably concluding with itself, the greatest monopoly of them all.
Here there are a couple of issues. First, not all monopolies are bad. Sometimes there's really only room for a single producer; forcibly creating extra competitors would raise prices and decrease efficiency. Even in cases where there could be competition, the monopoly may simply be more efficient. Once again crippling the monopoly to create competition would result in a less efficient market.
In fact, the only case where one has cause to worry about a monopoly is that in which the monopoly was obtained or maintained by an act (or acts) of aggression against real or potential competitors. Since such acts are already illegal when committed by any individual or organization except the State, the only monopolies one has cause to worry about are those created or assisted by the State.
The second issue, which builds on the first, is simply this: Why would the State bother to cripple a monopoly that it created in the first place? Obviously, it would do no such thing, unless perhaps it had the occasional need to keep its pet monopolies on a leash; consequently, any antitrust laws it may enforce must primarly be employed in crippling non-aggressive monopolies in efficient markets, wasting resources and raising prices.
I wouldn't try to use that argument in support of copyright laws if I were you. The reason why such actions would be difficult to justify is that they were the wrong actions. The Depression was the inevitable consequence of prices that were too high, a result of monetary expansion and easy credit during the period leading up to 1929. The change in policy from laisse-faire to active intervention, price controls, and the sort of willful waste of resources you brought up are the primary reason the Great Depression lasted for so long when all the prior depressions corrected themselves, typically in under a year. Depressions are symptoms of malinvestment; FDR forcibly maintained the malinvestments, causing the symptoms to drag on long after they would have otherwise brought about their own cure. The end of the Depression was brought about mostly by the start of WWII, not by FDR's policies.
You can find a far more detailed analysis of the economics of the Depression here: America's Great Depression.
I'm not a lawyer, of course, but I don't think the MIT license would prevent them from redistributing anything. It only includes the standard "no warranty" clause and a requirement to include the license and copyright notice when distributing the software. The BSD license has more restrictions than that, and there's plenty of BSD code in a standard Windows distribution.
As opposed to the heartless, self-absorbed, unfeeling they-don't-make-as-much-as-we-think-they-should- and-thus-shouldn't-be-allowed-to-accept-such-jobs- even-though-their-alternatives-are-all-worse posts?
The solution to "exploitation" is simple: offer them something better. Complaining about the organizations offering them the best jobs available to them in their situation is perhaps the single worse way imaginable to go about improving said situation. Great way to hold them back, though.
I don't expect road travel to go away anytime soon, and obviously road-building and maintenance have to be paid for. Logically, those who use a given road ought to pay the owner for their use of it (unless the owner wants to run a charity). Local roads would probably be best handled through a co-op of some kind, like most other utilities; longer routes -- inter-city roads, interstates -- would most likely charge tolls. Other arrangements are certainly possible. The only condition imposed is that everyone must have equal rights -- meaning that no one can be forced to pay for someone else's use of the roads, since such a system can only be maintained by allowing some people more rights than others.
I'm perfectly happy to accept others' decisions, so long as their decisions concern those things which are rightly theirs to control: their own actions and their own property. What we are discussing, however, is the practice of placing the will of the majority over the liberty and fundamental rights of the minority. In other words, democracy.
The ones that ought to be living on an island are those who refuse to respect the liberty of others. They are the ones who cannot tolerate differences of opinion.
I didn't mean that at all. I agree that income taxes also distort the market -- in fact, any tax whatsoever will distort the market somehow. The point of a tax is to reallocate production, both by inhibiting the item taxed and encouraging the good the tax money is spent on; a tax which didn't distort the market would be meaningless.
On a high level income taxes have an effect more or less opposite that of sales taxes, although the details are generally different enough that they can't truly be said to cancel each other out. The overall, national balance may be restored (although there's no way to determine whether that has been occured while the distortions persist), but on an individual basis some will be coerced into saving more than they otherwise would, and others will be pressured to consume.
True enough. You could say that people are indeed "choosing" to save -- but when it comes to economic analysis, that choice is influenced by the taxation, and thus by a threat of force, which means that the amount they are choosing to save is not equivalent to the optimal level of saving which would exist in the absence of coercion. Ergo, the tax results in a suboptimal balance between saving and consumption.
There's nothing "cynical" about it; those were merely the facts of the case.
Representation isn't the issue. The simple fact is that it doesn't matter whether a given policy has even 80 or 90% support among the entire populace: not one person in that 80 or 90% has the rightful authority to impose their preferences on the 10 or 20% that disagree; consequently, the group as a whole cannot have such a right either, since the rights of a group are merely the aggregate rights of its individual members.